← The Rich Roll Podcast
The Rich Roll Podcast
Walking As Medicine: Craig Mod’s 300-Miles On Foot, Japan's Philosophy Of Enough, & The Profound Power Of Undistracted Presence
02:52:21
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- [00:01]
Rich Roll
Movement is so much more than just exercise or training or motion even. Movement is a language. It's a way of connecting body, mind and environment. Movement as a way of being, a way of being that brings me close to myself, closer to other people, and to what matters most in life. And for me, what we wear in that pursuit plays a crucial role. And that's what I appreciate about on they engineer apparel that supports and and elevates the practice of movement itself. From running shorts with built in support to technical tees that cool you down right where it matters. This is apparel born from precision and tested by elite athletes, but made for anyone committed to the path. I've been with on since 2023 and I'm still just so impressed by how they continue to elevate and innovate in the name of purpose, not Flash. Head to on.comrichroll to explore gear that supports you every step of the way. We're brought to you today by Bon Charge. Now it's fair to say that I have subjected my skin to a lifetime of harsh treatment. Thousands of hours in overly chlorinated indoor pools, extensive sun exposure and pretty much almost no concern for skin care. And I would say it wasn't until I was about in my mid-50s that I started doing what I should have done all along, which is taking care of my body's largest organization. This shift marked a fascination with the science of skin rejuvenation and in turn led me to the incredible product line from Bon Charge. Most notably their red light face mask. There's so much cool science behind red light therapy and numerous red light products and brands are available. But what drew me to Bon Charge was their approach to specific wavelengths. Their red and near infrared light is designed to rejuvenate your skin at a cellular level. It's completely non invasive. Just 10 minutes is all requires a day, which I do at home, preferably when nobody's looking. The design is incredibly thoughtful. There's no cord, it's comfortable and it's slim enough for easy travel. There's just nothing elaborate about it, just science backed wellness made accessible at home. So check it out. Go to boncharge.com richroll and use coupon code richroll to save 15%. That's B O N C H A R G.com/R I C H R O L L and use coupon code richroll to save 15%.
- [02:32]
Craig Maude
I started doing these huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days. 20, 30 40k a day with this big pack on. No social Media, no news, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment. Getting rid of all that, ratchets up your attention, cranks up the focus. I'm just collecting little archetypes of possibility. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like for me. What I get out of these walks, I want to talk to as many people. I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible. It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live well.
- [03:10]
Rich Roll
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So right now, as I'm recording this introduction, this missive, it's Friday, May 2nd, which is six days before, and by the time you're hearing this, a few weeks after going under the knife for a pretty extensive procedure called spine surgery, where they're going to go in through my abdomen to basically scrape out the disc between my L5 and S1 vertebra. So they can insert this cage, basically, which creates space for the nerves that are currently impinged and contains this marrow material that ends up growing bone that, over time, like six months or more, will fuse these two vertebrae together. Then they're gonna flip me over and they're gonna go into my back to insert screws and rods to basically hold the whole thing together. So my point is that this is gonna be a thing. I'm a little bit scared, but I'm also looking forward to finally resolving this chronic issue that I've had for far too long. And my recovery is gonna be long as well. It's gonna go on for a long time. And my movement practice is going to be focused predominantly on one type of activity. There's going to be other stuff, but there's going to be one thing that I'm going to be doing a lot of, and that is walking. Which is interesting because today's guest is kind of an expert when it comes to all things walking. Not in terms of the physiology of it or matters related to the biomechanics of it, or even recovering from back surgery, for that matter, but really on matters of meaning. His name is Craig Maude. He's an artist, he's an author, he's an essayist and a photographer who has spent the last 25 years living in Japan, where he's been sharing his insights with words and images, which he packages both online in newsletters and other forms of media, as well as in a series of these really beautiful books. But central to Craig's life, and by extension, his art, is walking. Walking as a sort of inner cartography which is something he has done across vast distances of Japan that has also taken him all over the world, often in the company of former POD hero Kevin Kelly, with whom he co runs or co walks, I should say. Kevin's famous walk and talks retreats the profundity of walking as this way of reclaiming our attention, of attuning ourselves to the present, to our surroundings. This means for ruminating on the meaning of our lives, to unlock creativity, to connect with ourselves, with other people, to make sense of our past and the world around us. These are all themes fully mined in Craig's wonderful new memoir meets 300 mile walking travelogue of rural Japan, which is entitled Things Become Other Things. Not only is Craig a deeply thoughtful guy and a terrifically talented writer, but the improbable arc of his life is something really remarkable that we talk about today and hints at the ineffable, I think, which now you are privileged to behold in what is one of the more soulful conversations I've had in the history of this show. It's the kind of conversation that reminds me why I got into this whole podcasting thing in the first place. In addition to the new book, you can find all things Craig Maude@craigmod.com including his newsletters Rodin the and Ridgeline, and this very cool membership community platform that he hosts called Special Projects. So hopefully by the time you're hearing this, I survived my back surgery. If I did, you're gonna be hearing all about it pretty soon. But right now, let's hear from Craig. Great to have you here, man. I'm excited to get into this with you. You've lived a really dynamic, interesting life off the beaten path and are here back in the United States reporting back with wisdom for us Westerners who have led our lives astray and allowed our attention to be robbed of us. I thought a good way to kind of launch into it is with something that you say, which is lightness above weightiness. Elevate everyone you encounter. And this is a sort of theme for your work and your creativity, but it's really a mantra for life. So how did you come up with that? What does that mean?
- [07:34]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean, that grew directly out of the walking, out of the big walks. So I started doing these big walks I started doing about 15 years ago, but I would say the first real, real, real big one that I did, where it was solo, it was kind of under the rule set that I now use for all my big walks, was about six years ago and, and I was reading a lot of the literature about Japan from the 80s and the 90s, and there was this kind of heaviness to it all, the way people would write about Japan. And there was also this sense of real disparity of kind of perspective of writing down on Japan. I mean, I don't want to say it was explicitly sort of racist, but there was a kind of Western way of going to Japan, writing about it, being like, oh, now I understand this place. Let me explain to you these people that sort of implicitly were of below the writer in a weird way. And that always made me uncomfortable. And I started doing these big, huge walks where I'd walk for 30, 40 days, 20, 30, 40k a day with this big pack on. And I started talking to everybody on the road, just saying hello, saying hello, saying hello. And I've lived in Japan for 25 years, so the language is no problem. I can speak to everybody. Even in the countryside where the accents get pretty gnarly, I can kind of hang with them. And I just realized what a gift it was to be able to meet all these people just exactly where they were, you know, and to. It's so easy to focus on the negatives or to focus on, I don't know, the heaviness of situations. And so just sort of, again, implicitly through the walking itself, there was a lightness to these interactions, to meeting these people, to being out on the road. And then also when I started writing these conversations down and started kind of giving these people a voice on a bigger stage than they had, I realized naturally I just wanted to elevate these people. I was just so in love with everybody. I think that was the thing that was surprising was this incredible amount of love I had for everyone I was meeting on the road. And so that's sort of where that phrase comes from.
- [09:42]
Rich Roll
Right. And in the writing or in the chronicling of that, making sure that you're translating the sensibility and your emotional experience of these encounters in a way that is understandable and digestible. Even if you're contending with weighty subject matters and themes.
- [10:00]
Craig Maude
Exactly, yeah. Because, I mean, a lot of the Japanese countryside is depopulating. Right. And so Japan's kind of on the forefront of what's happening to most first world countries, which is just population is going down. Japan is now, I think, at like 1.2 kids per woman now, I guess, you know, South Korea is at the lowest. I think it's 0.7. You need 2.1 to maintain population. So these are pretty Dire numbers. And in Japan, you go to Tokyo, Tokyo's growing, Tokyo's full of kids and life, and you don't feel that at all. But you get into the countryside and feel that acutely everywhere. And so it can be easy to, I think, like, dwell on that, to focus on, oh, my God, all these towns are disappearing. What does that mean? And I've tried to instead go look at the social infrastructure that's here for these people that remain and how they're kind of being supported by this greater whole. And what does that mean? Yes, it's disappearing, but there's a certain amount of grace. I kind of. I use that word a lot in when I'm writing about these countryside towns. You know, there's a certain level of grace that's happening here that's present, that feels really humane and important. And so that tends to be the thing I focus on.
- [11:12]
Rich Roll
I want to tease that apart. But before we do that, I think it would be worthy for you to just articulate your thesis of Japan. I'm sure people say to you all the time, like, what's it like to live there? Like, how is it different than the way we live? And, you know, despite our deeply interconnected world, Japan still is a world apart. And it. And it has its own rules and.
- [11:35]
Craig Maude
Its own culture and.
- [11:36]
Rich Roll
And it's fascinating, but it can also be impenetrable for somebody like myself who's never visited there and just hear stories about it.
- [11:43]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [11:44]
Rich Roll
So how do you, like, breathe life into that?
- [11:47]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean, I feel deeply uncomfortable. Yeah.
- [11:50]
Rich Roll
I'm not saying you have to be an ambassador for, you know, like, your words are the, you know, definitive definition of this. But, like, from through your lens, like, putting, you know, putting, you know, sort of belying, like, what our preconceptions might be or our assumptions.
- [12:08]
Craig Maude
Yeah. So, okay, if I was to sum up, like, what I. The goodness I feel from Japan, it's that there is this kind of ambient sense of enough. Like, people have an enough line. Like, there is. And I don't mean that in sort of like, oh, there's a lack of striving or something like that, but just the fact that the middle class is so pervasive, that there's a certain kind of, I'd say, high earner place. That gap between the lowest and the highest is very small compared to America, for example. And America, to me, feels like it's a country that doesn't have enough of anything. That ceiling is infinite. And the enough thing in Japan manifests in a number of ways, I think one of the most easiest to understand is this idea of a living national treasure. So I was actually invited to photograph Jiro, the sushi dreams of Jiro when I was 26.
- [13:02]
Rich Roll
Wow.
- [13:04]
Craig Maude
I'd never eaten a real sushi meal in my life. I'd been living in Japan. I'd been there for about six, five, six years at that point. And I got this call, hey, this guy Jiro is going to be given living national treasure status. We want to do a little magazine piece on him. Can you go and photograph him? He's like, he'll be ready for you at noon on Tuesday or whatever. I was like, okay, who is this guy? Kind of like find him on, you know, no Google maps back then. So, you know, look, try to look him up. I don't. Have you ever been to. You haven't been to Judo's, right? No. You've never been.
- [13:33]
Rich Roll
I've seen the documentary though.
- [13:34]
Craig Maude
And so it's in a subway station. It's like, it's very bizarre. So it's like you have to go underground. There's no windows. You're in a subway station and you're like, it just looks like a random sushi shop. So I go in, again, no research. I don't know who this guy is. And there's sort of a handler. And then there's Jiro behind the counter. And he goes, he goes, modo san, have you had lunch? And I go, no, not really. He's like, let me make you lunch. And so I got this one on.
- [14:05]
Rich Roll
One experience with sushi is with the world's greatest master of it.
- [14:10]
Craig Maude
I mean, I had.
- [14:10]
Rich Roll
How is it possible that you had lived there so long and not had sushi?
- [14:14]
Craig Maude
That's why I said, like, so I had had like kaiten sushi. So like the cheap, like it goes around on the conveyor belt and you kind of all. I again, like, I grew up without an adventurous palate. Like, I really did not eat. I grew up on spiettios, basically Chef Boyardee fried bologna.
- [14:29]
Rich Roll
And yet there was this thing inside of you that demanded to move to Japan when you were 19. We're going to get to that, but let's leave that aside for the moment.
- [14:37]
Craig Maude
But so I had, you know, like egg roll thingies on top of, you know, rice and stuff like that. But I had never had actual sushi sushi. Again. I didn't have the money to have actual sushi sushi, you know. And so I sit down and Jiro gives me this one on One thing when they show me how to eat it, and, you know, it's like you have a little plate in front of you, and then he just makes the nigiri. You know, I'm watching him like, wow, this is so beautiful. And he puts it on the plate, and then he's like, you know, you put it in fish side down, and you use your hands to eat it. So all of this, I was like, what's. Where am I? And I was like, ooh, this is really good. I was eating, like, each one, I'm like. I'm just sort of, like, popping into my mouth like it's Wendy's or something, you know, And I'm not really sitting there with it because I'm. I'm a little nervous.
- [15:20]
Rich Roll
You're not giving it the due respect that a culinary master deserves, or he's probably used to when people, you know, sort of have this transcendent experience.
- [15:29]
Craig Maude
Just his bump. Just this bumbling idiot. You know, 26 year old. I got, like, this ponytail. You know, it's like, I was probably hungover. You know, it was just a ridiculous situation. And so, you know, I ate it, photographed him, photographed his son. He was there, photographed another one of his students. And at the end, I was, like, standing with his son. Oh, that was really good. I was like, I'd like to eat that again. How much would that cost if I came back for lunch? And he's like, oh, what you ate today was like $300. And I was like, what? I mean, rich, I've never, at that point in my life, I'd never paid more than, like, $15 for, like, an entire meal.
- [16:04]
Rich Roll
But you knew going in that you were there for a purpose, which was to photograph this living legend. So you must have had some inkling that this might not be $15 worth of food.
- [16:15]
Craig Maude
I appreciate. I appreciate that. How much optimism you have about my view. I mean, it was pretty ridiculous. So the point being is that people like Jiro, who's got a shop in a subway station underground with no windows, and yet can be recognized as a living national treasure. And you see this across the board. You see this in terms of potters, in terms of sword makers. Everything in Japan can kind of be elevated in terms of craftsmanship. And those people do not make a lot of money. And they live very humble lives. And I think that having a social structure that is able to elevate craftspeople, people who commit themselves to mastery of something that's such an. Oh, my God, just having that ambiently in society In a way that it's not about the money and it's really not about status. Because these people are all, for the most part, almost totally unknown. They're just kind of recognized by this kind of cultural body. I find that really inspiring and I think a lot of my work is derived inspiration from that.
- [17:16]
Rich Roll
Yeah, it feels like we were chatting before. But your books, your work, even the way you present your work online is all very aesthetically attuned. There is a sensibility to it that has been highly considered and that feels very Japanese aesthetically and just with respect to intentionality and respect for craft. Right. Skill and craftsmanship are revered and the aspiration is to, you know, infuse whatever it is you do with some semblance of that. But how does that reconcile with what we know about Japanese corporate culture and like, you know, work super hard and, you know, stay out all night drinking and you miss your train and you sleep in one of those like little. Yeah, you know, like little. What do you call them? Those hotel that are just like little capsules.
- [18:10]
Craig Maude
Capsule hotel. If you're lucky, you sleep in the capsule hotel.
- [18:13]
Rich Roll
Yeah, that feels like a different world from what you're explaining.
- [18:15]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the paradox, right, is that there is definitely this majority cohort of life in Japan, which is extremely depressing to a certain degree. You know, it's this. I'm going to do a 90 minute commute on a pack train, squish like a sardine. It used to be worse. You know, I think the 80s were sort of was sort of the peak of that during the peak of the bubble. And things have kind of post bubble pop in the early 90s, in the last 25 years of Japan has been sort of frozen in a weird way. It's been a very strange experience. I've lived there since 2000, and when I arrived from basically 2000 to 2015, almost nothing changed. You turn on the TV, it was the same people on TV. You turn on the radio, it's the same people on the radio. The prices of things, this has been a big deal with inflation in the last three, four years. The yen has gotten really weak. Dollar's gotten really strong. Covid screwed up shipping, so a lot of products just cost more. And shops for the first time in like 40 years rose prices for shops. This is like such a big deal because in Japan this idea of the joren, the regular customer is honoring the regular customer and respecting the regular customer. And so if the regular customer expects a morning set that costs $3, where you get an egg and toast and coffee and you can have your cigarette. That's what you, as a owner of the shop, wanted to deliver for decades and decades and decades. So when you have to raise it to $3.20, it's a huge deal. It's a huge. And there's a huge amount of apologies. And you should see the signage that was up for, like, raising 50 cents for this hotel or something. I mean, it was really heartening in some ways that. That. That people cared that much. But Japan was frozen for most of the time I was there. And now in the last five to 10 years, tourism has kind of like rediscovered Japan in a big way. And I think social media has played a part in that. And, you know, and through that, Japan has kind of had this new influx of energy, and it's been responding to that in different ways. But the core of the country is a bunch of office men, office women commuting on trains in pretty dire circumstances.
- [20:30]
Rich Roll
It has tremendous cultural relevance, though, in terms of, like, fashion and trends, things like that.
- [20:36]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [20:37]
Rich Roll
But being older than you, the period that preceded this extended phase of relative stagnation was a period in which, during my childhood, Japan was dominating everything. I mean, all electronics, all innovation, technology, it was all coming from Japan. And I grew up with the mindset that Japan was going to take over the world. The idea that now it's China, it would have been unimaginable, but due to economic forces or tariffs or whatever was happening. I'm not an economics expert, but something happened that created a shift and left Japan kind of in the lurch.
- [21:18]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Japan's fourth biggest economy now, 10 years ago, is number two. So that's been interesting and I think complicated for Japanese people to reconcile with as well. But a big part of that was just simply stagnation. Like, there was kind of a momentum that grew in the 70s and 80s. I mean, the economic miracle of Japan, if you look at the 60s, 70s and 80s, I mean, it truly is unbelievable. Like, Japan, post war, you go to Tokyo in, like, 1946, 47. I mean, it was gone. The city, there was no city. It was eviscerated. It was completely annihilated. And then so to rebuild from that. And a big part of walking through the countryside for me is trying to feel what is happening to the country today. How is it changing today? But to look at where Japan was post war to where they got within 30 years, I mean, it really, truly is one of the most incredible economic turnarounds. In the history of humanity.
- [22:13]
Rich Roll
And what is particular about the Japanese ethos that allowed them to go from that devastated post war state into this Phoenix, Phoenix, like, you know, kind of resurgence so relatively rapidly.
- [22:27]
Craig Maude
I mean, again, I'm not.
- [22:29]
Rich Roll
Well, you've lived there, you know, your entire adult life.
- [22:32]
Craig Maude
I know, I know, but I wasn't. I wish I had been there. I would have loved. If I could like take a little time machine, I wouldn't go to the Edo era. I'd go to like 1960 and just see what. 1950, 1960. I mean, I think it's the collectivism thing. I think it's the fact that they're able to kind of like you can have this thesis about what we should be doing right now. And then everyone's just like, yep, let's do that for good and bad. I mean that was sort of a negative thing during World War II. Everyone kind of got moving in the wrong direction. But if you can move that collectivist kind of mindset in the right direction, you can do incredible things economically.
- [23:03]
Rich Roll
But with respect to this idea of walking through the countryside in these rural areas, the off the beaten path tracks that you've been on and attuning yourself to the decline and the impermanence and all of these things, I mean, it harkens back to your youth and in certain ways is very similar to the environment in which you grew up as a kid, which then kind of catalyzes, you know, all this internal reflection about identity which is really the terrain of your books or certainly the latest book. But let's go back to that time. I mean, you paint the picture of growing up in Connecticut in this very strange household and you know, leading up to this even stranger decision that you're going to move to Japan at age 19.
- [23:56]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean I grew up in basically a post industrial American town. So the town was typified by. There was an airplane engine factory that employed most of the town. If you look at the last 120 years of the town or whatever, that was the major employer. And then there was the gun factory culture across the river and Coca Cola bottling factory. I mean, so it was very much, you know, salt of the earthy sort of place. My grandparents on both sides of the family both worked at the airplane engine factory. That's where they met.
- [24:27]
Rich Roll
Right. And as you say in the book, basically are manufacturing, you know, the machinery that was then utilized to drop the bombs on places that you have walked through.
- [24:37]
Craig Maude
Exactly. So to feel that because when you, when you walk the Countryside, you feel where was hit and where it wasn't hit, because there's sort of an aborted history that you sense in some of these towns that were firebombed, you know, and so much of Japan was firebombed. You know, it was all civilian populations for the most part, you know, with military sort of components. But you feel this kind of aborted history where this city, you know, you walk through Nagoya. Nagoya doesn't feel like a city with a history. It's so surreal. It's so bizarre. It's almost like. Ambient thing. It's like. Almost like the smell of it. It's like it stopped in. Or it was born in 1945. And then you have these other places where the history goes for 1,000, 2,000 years. And. Yeah, I mean, walking and thinking about it and then realizing that some of the airplane engines that were built for the bombers came out of my hometown that my grandfather probably had his hands on is a very surreal thing. And then being able to meet some of these older folks in these areas whose parents fought in the war and being able to meet with them in this really kind of beautiful, peaceful way and think about how quickly we can kind of transcend these, you know, these. These terrible, violent impulses. I find a lot of inspiration in that. But I also find it being very bizarre that there's that connection, you know, through my grandparents working in an airplane engine factory. The war, these roads that I walk today, there's a lot there.
- [26:04]
Rich Roll
You were adopted.
- [26:06]
Craig Maude
Yep.
- [26:06]
Rich Roll
Your. Your adopted father seems like he was a real piece of work.
- [26:13]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I just.
- [26:15]
Rich Roll
The anti. The. You know, the anti. Pattern, you know, mentor.
- [26:20]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [26:20]
Rich Roll
I mean, those stories are incredible.
- [26:22]
Craig Maude
Yeah, he. You know, it's like my parents adopted me and then got divorced basically two years later, which I find really fascinating. I mean, I find fascinating.
- [26:32]
Rich Roll
Yeah, if you're gonna adopt somebody, you think you.
- [26:35]
Craig Maude
You know, it's like. It's like you think there'd be a little more.
- [26:38]
Rich Roll
That says everything you need to know almost a little bit.
- [26:40]
Craig Maude
I mean, in a. In a good way, I mean. So my earliest memories are getting bit by a dog. So we had this little dog named Jacques for some reason. And I remember it was under the bed. I got bit by the dog.
- [26:51]
Rich Roll
I remember very continental.
- [26:54]
Craig Maude
Jacques, but there's no. I don't know why it was called Jacques. That's truly one of the most bizarre naming elements of my family's history. Maybe I'm inventing that. And then all the other memories from that house are Just my father in Fruit of the Loom underwear at the dinner table, eating steak and screaming. It's just like. And the thing he said to my mom that is still the most incredible, sad thing anyone's ever said to anyone in the history of the world is, he goes, in this house, woman, I am Jesus Christ. And you're like, where does that come from? Where does that come from? But it comes from his father was an alcoholic who abused him, his stepfather. His mom remarried, another alcoholic who was also abusive to him. You know, and he. You know, this my adoptive father, he was so sick his whole life. You know, he had two hearing aids, diabetes. He had this flatulence issue. I mean, he just. Like, all of my memories with my dad are going to the movies and wanting to, like, curl up in a ball and die because he would be farting in the movie theater, and, like, people around us would start gagging, would have to get up and leave. You know, it was just this man of. Just a constellation of deficits, you know?
- [28:09]
Rich Roll
Yeah, yeah, that's the phrase you use in the book. I mean, the biopic writes itself. But there's this other story that you tell around being in a movie theater, beyond the farting. It's sort of like, well, just dump your shit on the ground. Like, the ground of the theater is the garbage pail, and they'll pick it up. But that is a very, you know, interesting choice, you know, in terms of stories to tell, because of Japan's, you know, very different relationship to garbage, you know, and you talk about, like, the Starbucks cup. Like, can you just elucidate that a little bit? Because I think that is a window into the Japanese sensibility.
- [28:49]
Craig Maude
Yeah, well, garbage in Japan is your responsibility. Like, if you are carrying a Snickers bar, you know, it's like. It's so funny, the psychology of garbage. Like, you have a Snickers bar in your. Your pocket. You're totally cool with having a Snickers bar in your pocket. And then you're, like, walking. You go to park, you eat the Snickers bar. Suddenly, that wrapper is like toxic waste. It's like, you have to get rid of this. Where's the garbage can? Da, da, da. And in Japan, you just don't have that. So it's like, if you had a Snickers bar and you ate it and you have a wrapper, you take the wrapper home and you throw it away in your own garbage. That garbage is not the responsibility of the city because you happen to eat it in the park or whatever. So I remember one time early in Japan, I had some coffee cup or something that I wanted to throw away, and I randomly went into. I was walking around Shinjuku, I remember very clearly, and I went into a random shop. I said, can I throw this away? Because in America, whatever, everyone's got a garbage can. No one cares.
- [29:45]
Rich Roll
Why would you think that? That was an odd question.
- [29:47]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Oh, my God. That guy looked at me like I just asked to stand on the counter and pee all over shoppers. I mean, it was just like, you couldn't have asked a more offensive thing to this guy. And I remember that hit me in this weird way of like, oh, wow, I'm in a different place. This isn't a country where anyone thinks the floor of the movie theater is the garbage. It's like, no father in Japan has ever said that to their kid.
- [30:14]
Rich Roll
But this idea of handle your own shit and don't make it anyone else's problem.
- [30:20]
Craig Maude
Yeah, in good and bad ways. Because Japan, I think, would benefit from a culture of therapy. So there is no therapy in Japan. I've been doing regular therapy with a guy in New York for the last eight years weekly. And I've missed. Even during these big walks, I make it a point to have my weekly session with Dan. I'm like, all right, where's Dan? All right, Dan, we're getting you in there no matter what. Even if I've done a 40k a day, and Japan doesn't have that. And so in Japan, I actually try to talk about my history of therapy quite openly. In the last few years, I've had the opportunity to do a lot of media. I have a regular monthly radio show in Japan now. And. And so I bring that up quite a bit because to destigmatize therapy, like some of your shit, own it, for sure. Like, you're garbage. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. But there's a lot of psychological stuff, too, that I think Japanese people think they need to own more than they probably need to.
- [31:18]
Rich Roll
Is it a. Is it a shame thing? Like, what does that stigma?
- [31:22]
Craig Maude
I mean, I just think America's done a really good job at destigmatizing it. Right? It's like, I literally don't know anyone in New York that doesn't have a therapist. It's like, for better or for worse, right? It's like, I'm going to my analyst today or whatever. In Japan, I just think that. And I don't think it's just Japan. I think Asia in General kind of has this talking about your emotions or you hear this a lot from Asian American immigrant kids, the sons and daughters of immigrants, where it's just so hard to talk to their parents about emotional things. And so I just think there's this kind of emotional repressiveness that is pretty pervasive there. And also there aren't that many therapists. And then people who do see therapists are like, in a really, really bad place. So I think the idea that you can see a therapist as kind of a palliative before things get bad, that's just not a philosophy that exists.
- [32:19]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I understand that. I mean, was it all that different here in 1942 or whatever? So it's here as well.
- [32:27]
Craig Maude
Exactly. Yeah.
- [32:29]
Rich Roll
So you're this kid in high school in Connecticut. You've. You've got your, your, your buddy Brian. You guys are doing whatever.
- [32:36]
Craig Maude
You're doing bad, dumb things.
- [32:39]
Rich Roll
Yeah. And then you graduate high school, you make this decision, you're going to move to Japan, and then suddenly, you know, a tragedy strikes.
- [32:46]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Yeah. So Brian and I met in first grade, side by side. You know, it's like. Couldn't be more totally on the same level. We kind of look like each other. He's like three months, four months older than me, so he's kind of like an older brother. And we just, you know, it's like there's this chemical thing that happens with kids. It's like you just fuse, you know, and like, I'm adopted. And I'd say the thing that has defined my childhood the most is the adoption. For sure, that just there's a lot there and we can talk more about adoption, the psychology of adoption. But, like, for me, Brian was a brother because I didn't have blood brothers, and so I didn't have blood parents. So to me, it was like you just choose who you want to be as part of your family. And we lived as close as you could live, you know, I mean, as siblings who weren't siblings. And all of my elementary school experiences are kind of infused with this kid. And then, as can happen, you know, testing in America kind of starts to separate kids out. I tested a little better. He was not so good at testing. And we kind of got separated more and more, more and more. And if you started going down a not great path in my town, it led to really not great things. You know, it's like I remember, you know, going around, like, I'd visit a friend's place, you know, and they had just gotten for Christmas, like, A sack of weed. That was their weed Christmas present, you know. But you go to their house and they don't have any furniture, you know, that sort of thing, God bless them, you know. And you're just like, oh my God. And when I think back too now, there was a. A lot of suicide attempts. I mean, both of Brian's sisters were pregnant by 14, 15, 16. There's just this kind of ambient sense of complex violence. Not to the fault of anyone in the town, but you kind of look at it. And even if you just systemically, systemically.
- [34:35]
Rich Roll
Go back now, how many of those kids that you went to high school with got out and are doing something different, right? Yeah, Yeah.
- [34:42]
Craig Maude
I mean, 0.0001%, you know, it's like, it's very small. So anyway, Brian and I ended up getting separated and like I was testing in a way that kind of put me in this almost like a little bit of a protective bubble to a certain degree. And it's funny, on the alcohol thing, throughout high school, I was straight edge. And I saw, because I had intuitive very early in my life, part of it being adopted, part of it seeing just how the town didn't have the infrastructure to kind of help you out. So I from, I'd say 10 or 11, was like, okay, I have to own all of this. I have to own my destiny here. And I saw drugs and alcohol as an obvious impediment. And I saw all the kids around me doing drugs and alcohol. And ever since I, you know, I remember 13, 14 or something like just deciding, I'm never going to touch that stuff in this town. When I left the town, it was very different, but in this town. Cause that will keep me here and I need to get out of here. And I mean, that intuition was sort of proven right in the sense that I graduated. Brian and I, we graduate. And a week, two weeks after we graduate, he's murdered at this house party that was not uncommon, that fights would happen and you had sort of gang stuff going on. It was kind of a mess. And just as Brian is being murdered, dying on the front lawn of this house under the sky at 4th of July, I'm on my way to Japan in this kind of. Both are sort of violent responses to a place to move to Japan and to stay there. It speaks to something that's a little bit broken in you to do that.
- [36:30]
Rich Roll
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- [40:44]
Craig Maude
Yourself in the moment. I had no awareness of that. Certainly it was again, just moving on, intuition. And also there was a socioeconomic choice. Like going to school in Japan was cheap. It was really cheap.
- [40:57]
Rich Roll
Why Japan? Now looking back on it so many years later, like, what do you make of this decision? Like, it feels like it was somewhat spontaneous. I mean, were you obsessed with Japan as a little kid?
- [41:09]
Craig Maude
No, I wasn't obsessed, but I. So I think, okay, if we were to break it down, I'm like 13, 14, I'm like 9, 10, 11, 12. And I loved video games, right? And the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, I think when I was like 8 or something or 9. And I just remember the most joyful moments of my childhood were connected with this dumb thing playing Zelda, playing Super Mario, playing Ducka.
- [41:33]
Rich Roll
It was made in Japan.
- [41:34]
Craig Maude
It was made in Japan. And I remember thinking like pio Pick.
- [41:39]
Rich Roll
Is continuing to write itself. Okay, I can see the scene where you're like looking at the.
- [41:45]
Craig Maude
So it was like this was, I mean, for Brian and me, this was our escape, right? And you kind of understand that this is really the power of video games in a lot of ways is it allows you to escape a situation for a few hours, a few, you know, 30 minutes, if that's how long you're playing for. But it is a form of escape and it can be a really positive one. I mean, for me, it activated my imagination, it got me thinking about storytelling. But it, it was this thing that came from Japan and I just made.
- [42:13]
Rich Roll
In Japan is an association with. With like, imagination, escape, safety.
- [42:19]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yes.
- [42:20]
Rich Roll
All of these positive emotional experiences that you were lacking in your. In your irl.
- [42:25]
Craig Maude
Exactly. Yeah. And the local video store that I used to bike to back when they had local video stores, one of the guys there was like an anime maniac back in the late 80s, so he was really early on anime, and he would make bootleg copies of like, Akira for me or Fist of the North Star. And, you know, we would watch these things and not really understand what they were about. I mean, Akira is a really complicated, weird movie. I don't know if you've ever.
- [42:50]
Rich Roll
But this has stayed with you because you keep referring to it in your book.
- [42:54]
Craig Maude
So, you know, there was this ambient thing of like, from outside of this place, this country called Japan exists. And it makes a few things that are kind of interesting and bring me joy. And like you said that, you know, it's a. It's kind of an archetype of safety and protection and happiness. And so I think that just stayed with me. And when the time came to study abroad or try to. I was going to drop out of school. I wasn't going to go to. I was just going to give up college. And when the time came to study abroad, I was kind of looking, I was like, what would it be like if I went to Japan? And I found a couple websites of universities? And I was like, how much does this cost? And it was like, I don't remember the exact figure, but it was like $5,000 for the year with a homestay. I mean, it was just so absurdly affordable. And even a plane ticket back then wasn't that expensive. You fly economy to Japan. There's no. I mean, hilariously, it's like there were no monitors in the seatbacks. It was a long flight, 14 hours or whatever from JFK. And. And I just thought, well, that makes sense. Let's go do that before we completely drop out of school.
- [43:58]
Rich Roll
And your mom, God bless her, had been saving for you ever since she.
- [44:02]
Craig Maude
Was a young person, ever since she was like 20. Yeah, she told me that story. It was just like she, you know, she didn't go to college until later and she graduated in high school. And like, she just wanted to be a mom. You know, she worked at the airplane engine factory. I guess her boyfriend dumped her or something. But she had just started saving for a kid that she knew she wanted to have at some point for education. Because, I mean, looking back at the salaries and everything. Like my family did not. We did not have an abundance. There was no sense of abundance. But my mom was able to save enough to basically say, look, leaving here is an option, going to college is an option. And that from a very young age she let me know. And so to have that baseline, there is a profound thing to give to a kid, to say that there is a way out. Even if I don't know the way out. Even if your dad definitely doesn't know the way out, maybe you can find the way out.
- [45:03]
Rich Roll
So how did it land with her though, when you announced that these resources were going to be deployed on the other side of the planet?
- [45:13]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't think she thought I was gonna be there for 25 years or like make my life there. So it was just. And you know, and it was a complicated thing too. I mean my grandparents, you know, they were very anti Japan. My grandfather had these weird rules. He never ate rice. He had this, I'm not gonna eat rice. Cause of World War II, which is, you know, an insane thing to associate rice with Japan. And he never bought a Japanese car, only bought Fords. Only bought. But yeah, I mean he was very consistent in this kind of inability to overcome these biases that he had built up during the war. And so for me to go there for them was emotionally quite complex.
- [45:55]
Rich Roll
But you become this emissary to resolve generational trauma.
- [46:00]
Craig Maude
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I eat so much rice just to eat it. Grandpa, you're about to make a grandpa.
- [46:06]
Rich Roll
Yeah, you can't get enough of it because you eating for the whole, the whole line back generations. So you land in Japan, this wide eyed 19 year old kid who has been adopted, who's now sort of unbeknownst to you, adopting a new country that also has a very different relationship with adoption in general, which maybe we'll get to that a little bit later. But that had to be quite a seismic shock to the system.
- [46:38]
Craig Maude
It was. And again, it's like none of this was conscious. Right. So you just, when you're 19, you still, you don't know anything about the world. I mean, you're really. That's a really young age. Right. And so you're just kind of moving on intuition. And you know, I moved to Japan, I'm in Tokyo. I didn't know anything about Tokyo. I'm living in Shibuyaku. I'd never heard of Shibuya, you know, which is now like everyone, everyone who's.
- [46:59]
Rich Roll
I've heard of that.
- [47:00]
Craig Maude
You've heard of it. Like, you know, every 12 year old knows Shibuya, they want to go to Shibuya. You know, it's like, it's this crazy thing that I really want went there knowing very little and immediately I just sensed, holy shit, everyone's taken care of. Like that was sort of the ambient sense that I think I felt in my bones because I had come from this place where again, when you grow up in it, you don't see it. And I get to Japan and it was just like everyone, I'm passing and I'm passing tens of thousands of people a day on my way to school. It was kind of like a 30 minute commute to school. I passed 10,000 people. I passed through Shinjuku station every day. And you just felt like these people were taken care of by something, something bigger than all of us. And that, that really blew my mind. I mean that just that I think that's why I ended up staying. That's why I committed to it.
- [47:49]
Rich Roll
That's what you were looking for. That's what you didn't have and what you needed.
- [47:52]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [47:55]
Rich Roll
It's, it's, it's almost this predestined thing, right? It was a faded thing.
- [48:00]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah.
- [48:02]
Rich Roll
I mean there is a. There's something ineffable about it that I think is really beautiful.
- [48:06]
Craig Maude
It speaks to soft power too. You know, it's like we talk about this thing of soft countries having soft power and like, you know, Japan producing these things of delight that happened to catch me when I was young and in a, in a. Really, in a place where I needed help, you know, and kids can't always get help from their environment. And sometimes it's this external third party thing that swoops in and provides a little bit of reprieve. And the fact that the soft power of that too, and Nintendo being such a good company, I think that this is also really interesting. If you look at all the video game companies in the world, Nintendo is genuinely probably the one least motivated by explicit capitalism and most motivated by joy and goodness of game design. So it's like there's a lot of games today that are essentially casinos, right? Casino style games, Candy Crush and all that stuff focused on making money. Nintendo obviously has to make money and they make lots of money. But you play Zelda, one of the latest Zeldas on Switch. That is a game with well defined boundaries. You can finish it. It's not about a casino mechanic, it's about exploration. During COVID I played with my daughter a Bunch. I bought a Switch. It was the first time actually when I was writing this book, I was like, oh man, I owe Brian some video game time. So I bought a Switch and I hadn't played video games in like 25, 30 years. And playing with my daughter was incredible, you know, and she was. How old was she? She would have been like 10 or 11. And being able to put it up on the projector and walk through these worlds and you just felt like this is a company that really does respect the gamer and respect, respect the customer.
- [49:44]
Rich Roll
In a way that, yeah, the nostalgia quotient is very high for that company.
- [49:49]
Craig Maude
Right.
- [49:49]
Rich Roll
It's sort of beloved by an entire generation perhaps for that reason. So even if the idea that it is a well run company by well intentioned people is not something you're aware of, it seeps into the products and that's perhaps why it's beloved in that way.
- [50:08]
Craig Maude
And it points back to the thing I said earlier, which is there's a sense of enough, right? And you just get a sense that Nintendo is not about looking at a spreadsheet going how do we make all these numbers go up forever? You know, it's like they want the numbers to go up, shareholders, whatever, they're a public company, yada yada yada, but they want the numbers to go up. But there is something, there's some sort of philosophy internal there that is saying we don't have to milk all of these things for the most possible money and in fact we want to be optimizing for just the most respect for the Jorenson, the regular, the customer, the gamer or whatever. Which I love that and I think it's why Nintendo, if you look, so many people want Nintendo to succeed. Like it's a weirdly high, the nostalgia part, quote quoting is part of it. But they've also just engendered a lot of good vibes over the years. And I love that, you know, as.
- [50:56]
Rich Roll
Much as Japan was a place in which you were like finding yourself, you were also, you have to like lose yourself to find yourself. Right? So it is this Lost and found thing, I mean, I mean your story and the way in which you kind of address the weightier themes and subject matter is a very yin yang thing. It's like. And within this you're finding yourself in this new place. You had to break free to reimagine what your life could be like. But there is also some grief and some sadness and a sense of loss and having lost yourself on an identity level by being so far Away from home.
- [51:42]
Craig Maude
Yeah, it's a great way to put it. Yeah. I mean it was, it was complicated as hell. You know, it's like. And you know, as much as I didn't touch drugs or alcohol throughout my teenage years, as soon as I got to Tokyo, it was like, you know.
- [51:55]
Rich Roll
No holds barred, bring it on game. Well, everyone's partying, right? I mean, it's a pretty alcohol rife.
- [52:02]
Craig Maude
Culture, the drinking culture. Thankfully in the last, I'd say decade, it's kind of calmed down a little bit. I think the younger generations are not quite putting up with as much power. Harassment slash like alcohol abuse that. But when I arrived, it was peaking. I mean we were at. It was, you know, I've been a musician my whole life. A drummer. I studied jazz. That was kind of one of the things that was. I had a few tricks that I was skills I was cultivating to like get me out of town, get me out of my place. Like, you know, tethers to the greater world. And music was a big one part of it. And when I moved to Tokyo immediately I joined at the university. I was at Waseda University, which is a great university. Amazing. It's kind of like a hippie version of Yale, sort of, if you want to. Like, there's a lot of like, like Murakami Haruki came from it. There's, you know, there's a lot of. Lot of artists and writers and stuff that come out of it. But I joined the music circle and immediately just started playing drums. And part of the reinvention thing was like, all right, no more jazz, let's do punk rock. So I joined a punk rock trio and the music circle. My God, did those guys drink? And so I joined them. Yeah, you know, good times until it's not right.
- [53:12]
Rich Roll
Yeah. How long? Until it wasn't.
- [53:16]
Craig Maude
I mean, so I drank. I was blacking out probably like two, three, four times a week from 20 to like 28.
- [53:29]
Rich Roll
I'd say that's a pretty good dose.
- [53:31]
Craig Maude
Yeah. And you know, lesser and higher moments in there. But it was this thing, you know. And again, being adopted is complicated because you don't have that family history to look at and go, oh, I should watch out for this or I should watch out for that or, you know, I have a predilection, you know, to drink 15 drinks a night. But. But there's something that activated in me if I had two drinks. I mean, you probably know this, right? It's like suddenly everything in life is for the next drink. It was just Unreal, that desire. And then also personality change. I mean, just a totally different person. Like, complete extrovert, sort of impresario of whatever of the place and, you know, buying shots for everyone and, like, getting everyone. Oh, you need to Dr. You know, it's like I've definitely almost killed friends of mine. Like, like, you know, it's like, you can kind of like chuckle about this now, but it's like I have friends who've, like, woken up in the street the next day, and they like, they're like, you. You did this to me. It's like I have no idea.
- [54:40]
Rich Roll
But, like, passing out on the street. I mean, from what I understand, like, that's not unusual in Tokyo.
- [54:47]
Craig Maude
So, no, they wake up, a cop is kind of shaking their shoulder, saying, hey, you gotta wake up. They're in front of like, Takashimaya, you know, department store or something, you know, and they kind of get up and go home. But, you know, for me, the drinking was a shock. How good I was at it in the sense of I could have 15, 20 drinks a night. And just the desire for it and how that it was almost like a perpetual motion machine. And as soon as you had three or four, it was just off. We were off to the races. I see that now connected to several things. One, exactly like you were saying, the complexity of being in this new place and trying to find yourself and trying to shed who you were. Right. And so I think alcohol can kind of act as a reset for that. But also, like, I didn't have any archetypes. I didn't have any mentors. I didn't have anyone I could talk to about these emotions. You know, I didn't have a dad I could talk to about any of this stuff. Like, you know, my mom, my grandparents. Like, no one could understand what I was doing. And, you know, in this new city, I didn't have anyone older that I could say, hey, I need help with this.
- [55:50]
Rich Roll
And no therapist.
- [55:52]
Craig Maude
No therapist. God, if I could just go back in time and just like, whisper into my ear in a bar somewhere, I'd be like, just get the therapist. Just do that. When you're 20, I think the alcohol was acting as kind of a surrogacy for the pain of wanting to become someone different and not knowing how to do it.
- [56:12]
Rich Roll
And also your best friend getting murdered and being brought up in a. In an environment of chaos.
- [56:19]
Craig Maude
Well, and the guilt of kind of leaving that behind too, and the guilt of. I think when he was murdered, I internalized a lot more guilt Than maybe I consciously recognized in the sense of like, what could I have done to have helped him? How could I have pulled him more in my direction? Could I have done that? And then you realize, like, when you're a teenager, like you're just trying to get your own stuff in order and it's so difficult. And so the idea that you could be. You don't have your mask on, you don't have your life jacket on, that you're saving another person who's drowning is just crazy. Right. And so I think that guilt was present in it, it as well. A lot of what I was doing.
- [56:51]
Rich Roll
And how long did you play out that narrative before you decided you needed to address it?
- [56:56]
Craig Maude
It was like I said 20 to basically 27, 28. And it was funny. I was very high functioning in the sense that I was going to the gym three times a week. I was biking. I got really into road biking. I do 200 mile loops on the weekend, totally hungover, sweating out like a gallon of whiskey. But I would go and do these things. So I had this weird knowledge that I think I needed to take care of my body so I could do more drinking.
- [57:25]
Rich Roll
Right. It's a twofold thing. First, like when you're in your 20s, you can kind of do. You can do that, you know. But secondly, and I relate to this deeply, like, if you are able to maintain being high functioning or high performing in whatever it is you're doing, that acts as a rationale, like, oh, you know, like I, you know, as long as I, you know, as long as I'm going to the gym or I could do these things that I don't have a problem, I don't have anything to look at. And then also a little bit of false pride or superiority, like for sure, like, not only can I like go out and have 20 drinks, I can still show up on time and crush it, you know, in school or in my band or in whatever else you're involved in.
- [58:09]
Craig Maude
Exactly.
- [58:09]
Rich Roll
And so then it gives you this inflated sense of power that is really just an illusion.
- [58:15]
Craig Maude
Yep, 100%. So I was, you know, I was working on. I was art director for Indie press and we were winning awards and I was throwing all these book parties in Tokyo that were like the biggest, most fun book parties that anyone ever had.
- [58:30]
Rich Roll
A big look at me.
- [58:31]
Craig Maude
Yeah, exactly. And, and getting these kind of artist residencies I was in. I was Benetton and gave me this residency in Treviso, north of Venice in Italy. And so I was doing all these things but even that Italy time, I remember how many times I blacked out in the week. I was just.
- [58:48]
Rich Roll
So you're like this tastemaker, Basically. Then at that time, I was really lucky.
- [58:54]
Craig Maude
I don't know, I mean, I happened to be focused on from a young age. I loved books, I loved storytelling, I loved novels, and I loved technology. And technology was twofold thing. One, there was just something magical about it, and I thought I could see how it could help with storytelling. And so that was kind of like part of the addiction. And then part two was like, holy crap, you can make a lot of money doing this. And like, wait, I can make more than both of my parents combined if I make web pages. This is me when I'm 14. It's like, okay, I should focus on this. We should cultivate this skill. So I had this weird skill set where I was making physical books that were winning design awards as physical objects. And then I was doing digital kind of design stuff and data visualization stuff. This is like early 2000s. That was also winning awards and getting me called to go abroad and be a judge at the art director's club.
- [59:42]
Rich Roll
You took a detour to Silicon Valley for a while, didn't you?
- [59:45]
Craig Maude
That was 2010, so that was kind of post, okay, let's get sober, let's fix our life. But in my early 20s, I was born in 80, so it kind of maps to years easily. But in the early 2000s, you know, I'm drinking like a, like a fish, kind of destroying a lot of like friendships and romantic relationships. And it was really when I was 26 and I was just truly what I thought was the love of my life, just this person that was absolutely perfect left me. You know, we went on this 40 day trip through Tibet. We met, you know, it was like this. It was this totally crazy adventure that we went on. We met instantly going on a 40 day trip. We're like, you know, drunk the whole time and it's just wild and like we're, you know, making love on a glacier and like, it was just insane. It was as crazy as you could imagine.
- [60:34]
Rich Roll
So good. It had to be doomed.
- [60:36]
Craig Maude
It was so doomed. And she left me. It was basically just like, you are killing yourself. Like, I can't be with someone like you. And that truly just emptied me out, broke me. And I, I was 27ish. And that was when I realized, okay, I gotta stop. Whatever I'm doing, I've gotta stop. And I was playing music and I was in the studio a bunch, but I was Also playing a lot of live gigs and there was a whole bunch of drinking connected with that. So I actually, I stopped playing music, which was kind of extreme. And I was like, I'm gonna take all this creative energy and it's gonna go into writing. Because I had been writing up until then, but I hadn't really committed, committed. And I was like, okay, let's transmute music energy into writing energy. And it was like three in the morning. I'm lying in my tiny six mat apartment, which is barely bigger than probably two of these tables.
- [61:27]
Rich Roll
Wow.
- [61:28]
Craig Maude
And I'm having suicidal thoughts. The love of my life has left me. I feel so empty. I don't know how to become the person I want to be, which is someone that's creative and knows how to love and knows how to accept love and can do these things. And I was like, all right, well, what do we do? And it's kind of funny now that I know about Stutz and his triangle and all this stuff. It's like I just intuitively I was like, okay, let's start running. And it was 3 in the morning, not like you. I didn't run 40 miles, but I got up and I ran like 5k around a quiet Tokyo at 3 in the morning. And I was like, that felt good. And I was like, all right, I'm going to try to cut the alcohol out as much as I can and start doing more of this running. And I signed up for a full marathon or a around Mount Fuji Lake Kawaguchi and started training for that. And that was my first. I think it did a couple things. One, I realized I can't just quit drinking. That's not going to work for me. I have to replace it with something else that gives me a purpose to not drink. And so by knowing I had to train, that was a way to say no to the drinking at night. It was also a way for me to tell friends I didn't have to drink. Because the problem is by the time you're 28, 29, you have the. This cohort of people that drink and expect you to drink. It can be a little difficult to almost like sociopathic to have to step away from that. You almost have to be like, all right guys, sorry, I'm never going to hang out with you again. It's like, I can't do this. And so I started doing that. But what was really happening, now that I look back at it, was I had no self worth. Like my self worth was sub zero. And all throughout my teens and my twenties. And part of this is the adoption component. Adopted kids. Now that I know more about it, I've talked to more people about it. I've been on adoption podcast with someone who's interviewed 3, 400 adoptees. And there are just these sort of pathological tendencies of an adoptee where you create all these emotional barriers, you sort of lower your self worth. Adoptees are four times more likely to be substance abusers, twice as more likely to have suicidal thoughts. There is just something implicit about, oh, you're not from our family, you're not from us. As much as that family may say, oh, we love you. People vastly underestimate the amount of work that has to go into making an adoptive kid feel great. And so then when you're in a situation like mine where these parents adopt you and then two years later they get divorced and then the dad isn't really there. I mean, it just doesn't that my mom had boyfriends and then I'd think, this guy's kind of like my dad. And then they would break up and there was no reconciliation and he would just disappear. And so you just think, oh, I'm someone who's thrown away. That's what you internalize. Oh, I'm someone who can be thrown away. And. And man, that really doesn't do wonders for your self worth.
- [64:11]
Rich Roll
That's super interesting. This idea that you're disposable and your higher self drops you into Japan. That has a very different relationship with disposability.
- [64:22]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that disposable component and the being taken care of by.
- [64:34]
Rich Roll
The greater whole component and the sensibility around adoption there. Like adoption is aspirational almost. Right. It's like I'm taking you under my wing because you are worthy, not because you were discarded.
- [64:47]
Craig Maude
And you see that kind of in the craftsman and craftwoman area of people being adopted into families to continue the name. And you see it in inns. So an inn that's been around for 600 years, it's not the same blood family, but it's. People have been adopted in and kind of taken over. Yeah, there is a really kind of healthy relationship with that idea of that you can be folded into a family, kind of like flour into wet dough. And it's not. You're not apart from the family. You're really integrated. So I think that felt good to have that ambience around me as well.
- [65:20]
Rich Roll
So the sobriety journey begins with the running. Like, does that work? Does that work for you? Like, how does this go? Like, no, you're not like falling into an AA meeting somewhere.
- [65:29]
Craig Maude
I'm not in an AA meeting because I don't. They have AA meetings in Tokyo now. I know about that, but I don't. I'm sure they had them back then, but I wasn't privy to it. And you know, it wasn't a, a like, okay, I'm done and like just, I'm clean now. It took me about three years to. And it was, if I look over those three years, it was about ratcheting up my sense of self worth. That's all I was doing. Again, subconsciously. I had no conscious, there was no plan to do this. The running was part of it. Take care of the body, body mood follows action, all that stuff. And it was like, okay, let me take care of the body. Start doing that. That's the one thing I have control over. I didn't have any money, so it's not like, oh, let me go do this fancy retreat in Thailand or something. I didn't have the means to do that, but I could go for runs. That's easy, doesn't cost anything. That started to feel good and I started charging more. I just had this moment where I was like, I'm going to start charging more for my time. I was doing basically tech consulting stuff because I just had these skills I'd built up as a teenager. And even though all of my main work was working on indie publishing and doing design for these books and working with these authors and putting on events and stuff like that, it was all physical book publishing. I had this skill set in digital where I could work for. I could do two weeks of work and have six months of living expenses. Because in Japan that was another reason I stayed was my monthly cost of living was $1,000. If I had $1,000 that covered rent, food and going out and having fun. So when that. So I was cultivating an asceticism as well, all throughout my 20s. And that gives you a tremendous amount of power, flexibility and you aren't beholden to doing a thing that you don't want to do. And so I was very lucky that in my 20s I was pretty uncompromising. As much as I was self abusing myself with the alcohol and not taking care of myself, I was uncompromising in that I, I was only working on projects I felt a deep spiritual, almost like theological connection to. And so I was doing these little gigs, tech things here and there. I was like, okay, what if I charge like 3 or 4x. And people started saying yes. I was like, oh, that's cool. And that started to raise, like if there's like a little internal self value meter, you know, it's like I started out, the meter was broken, you know, and then I went in there with running and we started to fix the meter a little and then charging a little more, kind of ratcheted up bit a little, little bit more. And then going out to Silicon Valley was sort of, I'd say, probably one of the most pivotal moments of my adult life. In 2010 I had this opportunity because of essays I had been writing. So gave up music, started committing to writing, putting these essays out in the world and they just started to do really well getting picked up. The New York Times is writing about them. It's like suddenly I've got all these followers. And I was invited to join this company in Palo Alto that was working at this intersection of kind of design, publishing, digital media.
- [68:17]
Rich Roll
Was that Flipboard?
- [68:18]
Craig Maude
It was Flipboard, yeah, Flipboard.
- [68:19]
Rich Roll
I remember Flipboard.
- [68:20]
Craig Maude
Flipboard. And so I jo right when they were like just started booming employee number eight, that sort of thing.
- [68:26]
Rich Roll
Oh, wow.
- [68:27]
Craig Maude
And to go there. And I moved in to this house two blocks from Steve Jobs and we were able to rent the house, me and these two guys from Stanford.
- [68:36]
Rich Roll
Woodside.
- [68:37]
Craig Maude
No, no, this was in Palo Alto, in old Palo Alto. Steve Jobs, I think he passed away in that house even he was right on Santa Rita. And it was, I don't know if you've ever seen it. It was.
- [68:52]
Rich Roll
I don't know that I have. I knew he had a home in Woodside, like a really nice place.
- [68:55]
Craig Maude
I think that was earlier actually when he was younger. He did the Woodside thing. He was like dating Joan Baez at the time. It was like this Dylan kind of like stalker, you know, sort of situation going on. But his main home, at least for the later years of his life, was in old Palo Alto. And it like, it's just a two story. It is the most unassuming place you've ever seen.
- [69:14]
Rich Roll
Like a couple blocks off University or something.
- [69:16]
Craig Maude
Exactly, yeah, yeah. Just super close to Stanford, you know, right off the Caltrain stop. Yeah, I mean, so I'd walk past his house every day. So I went from. For as great as Tokyo is, it is pretty provincial and people there don't really think on an international scale. So part of going to Silicon Valley was I was like, all right, let me see what it's like to work with these top, top, top people. And the Guy who invited me, Marcos Westkam, was a designer I had respected all throughout my 20s. I mean, he was probably one of the most, for me, most respected designers in the world. And to go be able to work with Marcos and have Marcos come to me directly and say, craig, you need to be here with us right now. This is so great that again, that little internal meter of like, do I have value? And you know, imposter syndrome is constantly like fighting against that. Do I have value? You know, these little things ratcheted up. So I moved to old Palo Alto and my two roommates were these Stanford D school guys. And like we moved into this house was like this cute little single story house. And I was sleeping on a yoga mat for the first month. There was no furniture. We had a kitchen table that we'd all kind of hunch around. One guy was a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, making amazing docs, these short form docs. And then the other guy was a guy named Enrique, Enrique Allen. He was just this bastion of love and creativity and he was kind of working with investments and stuff. And I moved Japan, famously doesn't really hug, doesn't really touch. So I'd lived essentially 10 years of my life without any hugs. And then I moved into this house in Palo Alto and these guys were just the freaking huggiest guys in the world. And every day I'm just being smothered by these hugs. And they were so positive. They were vegetarians, there was no drugs, alcohol, they didn't drink. And I went from this place of everyone's. Japan's getting blasted, blacking out. Alcohol is part and parcel of everything. Every meal is just meat. Japan loves meat. It's just like beef everywhere. To moving into this house where these guys are just hugging me constantly. There's no meat, there's no alcohol. And they come from clearly a place of abundance, these two guys. You just felt behind them were generations of love that had had manifested these two human beings and to be in their presence. I lived with them for three years to be in that presence. Even after two months. I met up with a good friend of mine, Liz Danzigo, this amazing design teacher educator. We met up for pizza in New Haven and she just, at the end of pizza, she just goes, craig, I don't know what the hell's going on, man. You're a different guy. I've known you for five years. At this point, you're a different human. Like, just keep doing this, whatever you're doing now, keep following that path. And so that was all just part of this, how do I give myself again, not having a mentor, not having an archetype, not having someone older to lead the way. How do I give myself a greater sense of self worth? And in doing that, the alcohol fell away pretty naturally. And I'd say It was about 31, when I was finally able to really kind of say goodbye for good.
- [72:28]
Rich Roll
Put it completely in the rear view. Yeah, but surrounding yourself with peers that are modeling healthy behavior, being such a profound thing, like they're not necessarily mentors, but you shifted your friend group and your environment such that you put yourself in a position to observe what that might look like for sure, and to be on the receiving end of that from them, to engender that kind of self compassion and self reflection, respect.
- [72:57]
Craig Maude
And I did it basically twice, right? So it's like my teenage years, I was in one place and I was like, I have to get out of here. And then I'm 20 and I'm now in Japan and doing kind of a reinvention, which some good, some bad, you know, whatever. The alcohol was suboptimal. If I could remove the alcohol from my 20s. And I don't really believe this idea of, like, oh, well, because you went through that, now you're a better, you know, like, you are who you are. I've met kids who are in a good place at 20, and it's much better to be in a good place at 20 than to be in a bad place and then struggle through alcohol and yada, yada, yada. It's like, maybe I can empathize with people who've had these struggles now in a way that you can't. It's difficult if you haven't. But if I could have avoided that, that would have been great. But there was then a part of me that at the end of my 20s, where I was like, okay, I need something else. And again, it was switching cultural contexts, Moving to Palo Alto to a place I'd never lived before, living with people I didn't know, and kind of putting on, again, this leaning into this new identity, which was an identity of abundance. You know, I was getting paid, you know, $30,000 a month or something like that. It's like I went from making $15,000 a year for most of my 20s.
- [74:01]
Rich Roll
Go back to Japan and live forever.
- [74:04]
Craig Maude
No, I was. But that was. That was always there because the escape hatch was always there. I was like, I know how to live on a thousand dollars a month, and I can live richly. So, okay, you just give me, you know, 30 months of living in one month. And in Palo Alto, I. I lived like in a yoga mat.
- [74:19]
Rich Roll
Getting paid that amount of money. Yeah, that's wild.
- [74:22]
Craig Maude
It was pretty weird.
- [74:28]
Rich Roll
So right around this time last year, Julie and I embarked on this really incredible, once in a lifetime, two week journey in India. We visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. We then went to Rajasthan where we toured ancient temples. We took in the vibrant colors and daily life rhythms of Jaipur and we walked the streets of Delhi, dining on its delights. The experience was profound in ways that words struggle to capture. But what really resonated was how people everywhere seek connection and understanding and how stepping outside familiar environments brings clarity to what truly matters. What I've been considering lately is this idea that home is where you find yourself. And therefore when we travel, our living spaces can actually serve this purpose for others. That's where Airbnb comes in, offering this really cool and practical approach to share your space when it makes sense for your situation. The extra income from hosting can help fund these perspective shifting journeys. And your home just might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host hey everybody, pay attention because this episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Now, I'm somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about the transformative power of storytelling, how sharing our authentic journey can inspire others. But it's one thing to construct a story, it's another thing to tell it, and another thing altogether to actually turn that into a digital reality that allows you to share your vision broadly and importantly, to create impact. And to do that, you need a great platform. And to do that, you need Squarespace. Because it's so much more than a website builder. With Squarespace's new blueprint AI, it's actually like having a design partner who reads your mind and you know, look, I know there's a lot of hype out there, a lot of slinging when it comes to emerging AI tools, but Blueprint really delivers. For example, you can share a few goals, and then it just automatically generates all this personalized content that actually feels authentically you. And for tech challenge creators like myself, they've got this drag and drop editing feature that makes the whole process surprisingly intuitive. I also appreciate how Squarespace has continued to evolve to support creatives in new and bespoke ways. For example, they've got this sell content feature. So, for example, if you're creating online courses or exclusive, exclusive videos or maybe membership content, Squarespace makes it super easy to set up a professional paywall and generate a Sustainable revenue stream for your passion. So check it out. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com richroll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Those guys that your housemates seem on some level to exhibit something that you talk about in the book, which for me, like, one of the biggest, most impactful things that, that. That I took away from reading your book is this idea I'd never heard of before called yo yu. Is that how you say it? Is that how you pronounce it?
- [77:48]
Craig Maude
Yo yu.
- [77:49]
Rich Roll
Yo yu.
- [77:49]
Craig Maude
Yo yu.
- [77:50]
Rich Roll
I want to hear more about this because I think this is a really cool and profound idea.
- [77:56]
Craig Maude
Yeah. So in yo yu in Japanese is, you know, and I bristle at the idea of like quoting a mystical Japanese word and saying like, you know, oh, this is like the magical art for you. This is the magical art of whatever.
- [78:11]
Rich Roll
It's just there. It's just a word they have. It is a word, an idea. We don't really have quite the word for it.
- [78:16]
Craig Maude
Exactly, exactly. And in English, it could kind of be empathy, but it's deeper than empathy. And in Japanese, the way I've come to understand it is it's having the space in your heart to accept someone else, to have space in your heart for someone else, an abundance of space in your heart and your life to be able to accept hardship, to be able to respond to hardship. And that's, I think, what I felt fundamentally when I moved there, is that having these systems on a greater level, supporting people, imbued. Everyone I saw on the street, everyone I was passing with this, a little bit of yo yu. And more people have more yo yo and less yo yu than others. But there is this sense of space in the heart. Like, you know, when I first got off Narita Express, you know, I arrive in Tokyo, this is how little I knew about Tokyo. I arrive, get off at Narita, get on the Norita Express. The train stops at Tokyo, Tokyo station. I think, oh, this is Tokyo city. Not knowing that Tokyo had 100 stations in it. So I get up at Tokyo station and I'm like, I have to go to Shibuyaku. I have to get to Shibuya. I was living in Hatagaya and I kind of looked befuddled. And someone came up to me, a woman maybe in her 40s or whatever. I was 19. So everyone felt, if you're over 30, you're the ancient. So a woman in her 40s comes over to me. And is like, do you need help? And I was like, I need to go to this address. And she's like, oh, God, my. My God, like, you're nowhere near. And she took me all the way, like a half an hour on the train. She took me to this other station, helped me transfer, did this thing.
- [79:43]
Rich Roll
That's unheard of.
- [79:43]
Craig Maude
That's unheard of. And that is Yo Yu in action. That is having an abundance of space in your heart to be able to do that for someone. And that immediately, that as being literally my first interaction I had arriving in Tokyo, I think just started to recalibrate, sort of reprogram my entire way of thinking about the way world.
- [80:02]
Rich Roll
It's a relationship with abundance, though, because in the west, abundance is something we're seeking. And when we get it, we reward ourselves by trying to get more of it and hoarding it. It's sort of an energetic thing. Your relationship with this energy is such that should you be lucky enough to have it, it's best deployed outward in service of other people. And when you have a lot like, then you have more to give, and it's your responsibility to give that right. And in doing that, you engender empathy. It allows you to forgive more easily. Like, it. It opens up space to your point for these other emotions that we tend to, like, kind of clamp down on, or we hoard those too. Like, I'm not going to forgive you until this or that. We're very conditional about these things.
- [80:57]
Craig Maude
Yeah. And I think being around people with Yo Yu and realizing I grew up in a place with no yo yo where everyone was economically kind of pushed against the wall. And in terms of what are our opportunities? Well, there aren't any. And so, like, when you're in a situation like that where you can fall, when you see how far you can fall, I think this is like another thing about the American condition that's a little bit scary is when you see how far you can fall and you can fall to hell. Beyond hell. Hell. In America, there just aren't those safety nets to catch you. When you see how far you can fall, it's really hard to feel a sense of abundance that you can give to other people. And so in Japan, because of all these structures and these social structures, and you can only fall, oh, I can see how far I can fall. It's not that far. It's not that scary for me to help this other person out. I think just being around that and feeling that and then being on these big solo walks that I'VE been doing now for six, seven years. It was in that, and I write about this in the book. I was able to. I'm able to laugh about who my father was. I was able to find this crazy sense of forgiveness for this guy that I didn't know was possible. I didn't know I was capable of. And feeling that, experiencing that is again, we're getting back to this self worth ratcheting. And I think having a sense of yo yo feeling that yo yo being able to deploy it in a way that's positive, that elevates people again, that just helps you feel like you're. You have more value as a human too. It's like it's mutually beneficial.
- [82:21]
Rich Roll
Why didn't you end up staying in Palo Alto? What caused you to go back?
- [82:28]
Craig Maude
It served its purpose. It was a great experience and like I said, probably one of the most profound, possibly most important three years of my life living with these guys doing this work with people that were operating at the highest, highest levels, getting paid these ridiculous amounts of money. But at the same time time, I felt like I had what I had cultivated in my 20s, the voice I had cultivated, the focus of the work I wanted to be focused on in my 20s. I felt like the financial abundance that existed in Silicon Valley was actively kind of working against what I had built up. Because as much as I was around these people who weren't drinking, were vegetarian, were giving lots of hugs and things, things like that, there was also this other layer of people and the majority of people who were just like, oh, let me get this Woodside house, or let me get this Atherton house, or let me get this, oh, I just got a new Maserati. I got this thing. And that, to me, it didn't jibe with who I had built up, who I'd spent the last 15 years building inside of me. And I had a lot of love for that person inside of me and who kind of worked in this intuitive way and had an uncompromising focus to work on books like these that were not going to make me nearly as much as staying in Silicon Valley. And I was really lucky I was being offered all these opportunities. I was close with EV Williams. I was being asked to work for every major company at that point was basically trying to hire me and have me be an advisor and all these things. And I just had this moment where I was thinking about moving to San Francisco and I was waiting in line to rent an apartment for $4,000. And it was in this neighborhood. I didn't really like. And there was a guy dying on the sidewalk next to me, and, you know, the apartment was kind of junky, and I was like, what am I doing?
- [84:11]
Rich Roll
What is this, like, 2012 or something?
- [84:13]
Craig Maude
2013. Yeah. 2012. 2013, yeah.
- [84:17]
Rich Roll
Okay.
- [84:18]
Craig Maude
And I had this moment. I was literally standing in line, and I just thought, okay, I'm done with this. I'm going back. And the whole time, I had kept my place in Tokyo kind of as, like this, like, you know, tether, you know, to the. To the. To where I'd been and Lacoste was. I mean, my rent, I basically never paid more than 600, $700 rent in my life in Tokyo. And so the $600 rent over there was a rounding error. It's like, okay, if you're making $30,000 a month, it's like, I could pay that. And I was renting it out to a friend the whole time anyway. I could go back very easily. And I just had this epiphany where I was like, okay, I'm going to work on books and I want to commit. During 2011, my father died, and I had to go bury him. It was this kind of complicated set of circumstances where he had moved to North Carolina when I was a teenager, and he had moved with his mother and his sister and brother in law, and they all died instantly within three or four years. So he was alone in the woods in North Carolina, and his family was small to begin with, and there were no relatives left alive when he died. And so I get this call in 2011, I just got into Palo Alto. We were in the middle of crazy work. You know, I'd replaced alcohol with, like, mega work, work mania. Working, you know, morning to night and trying to ship this. Yeah, I know, you're so surprised. Trying to ship this iPhone app. And my dad dies in the middle of that. And I'm like, God damn it, dad. Like, bad timing, you know? And it was basically like being called. If someone had picked a random person out of the phone book, it couldn't have been more of a stranger to me than this guy by this point point. So I was like, oh, hey, come to North Carolina to a town you don't know, and bury the stranger. And I went out there and I rushed through it all. And at the same time, even though I rushed through it all, there were moments of incredible profundity that I didn't get to sit with. And I was kind of rushing through it, and I was like, okay, at some point, I have to go back to that. And it was around that time, 2012 or so, I got the McDowell Writing Fellowship. I was really lucky. I applied randomly to McDowell to get a writing scholarship and to do a residency there. And McDowell is the oldest writing residency in the country. And I mean, it's just incredible. Have you ever heard of McDowell?
- [86:29]
Rich Roll
I've heard of it. I don't know much about it, though.
- [86:31]
Craig Maude
It's in New Hampshire. It's been around for 120, 30 years. I mean, it's just idyllic. And it's, you know, you're there with booker award winners, National Book Award winners, you know, like, oh, this person's played with Stevie Wonder. This composer's, you know, written for. It's just the top of the top. And I somehow snuck in and again, that ratcheting up, that little ratcheting up, and I went there and the thing I decided, okay, I need to work on is I'm going to sit with my dad for. I was there for six weeks, basically. Let me sit with this story and work on that for six weeks. And that was pretty important. And then feeling that and feeling like, okay, this is the path that my heart feels pulled towards, which wasn't building more technology stuff. It was really great. As a teenager, I had this fantasy of going to Silicon Valley and doing something. And then When I was 29, 30, I had the ability to go out and not only do it, but do it at one of the hottest companies with some of the most kind, compassionate, talented people I'd ever met. And to feel like I could stand toe to toe with all these mega talented a list people in that world and touch it and feel like, okay, I can do this. And now I know I don't have to do this.
- [87:37]
Rich Roll
A couple reflections.
- [87:38]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [87:39]
Rich Roll
On the one hand, I was rooting for Flipboard. This felt like the first app that was actually built for the iPad. Like, oh, this is. This is like an elegant way to, like, consume the things that I want to consume. I wanted it to succeed. Do I have you to blame for why this thing didn't work out?
- [87:59]
Craig Maude
No, you have me to blame because I quit.
- [88:01]
Rich Roll
Okay.
- [88:02]
Craig Maude
Stayed.
- [88:03]
Rich Roll
That's what I'm saying. So part of me wishes you'd stayed so this could. I could now be enjoying my content in that way. And, you know, from everything I understand, Ev Williams is a wonderful guy. And, you know, amidst all of those sort of iconic Silicon Valley pioneers, he's actually, we, we actually have him booked. He's coming in. I think we're trying to get a Date to have him come in because he's got this new thing, mosey about, like connections, gatherings. I've always thought he's a really interesting person. But on the flip side, the way I look at or interpret the story you just told is somebody who really got clear on what their values were. And you can't do that unless you value yourself. Like, you had grown to a point where that level of self esteem was sufficient to resist the temptation. You know, like a lot of money, a lot of. Like this is where everyone was going at that time. Like, all the incentives were pulling you in that direction. But you were able to honor, like, that voice within you that realized there was a different path for you that would be more honoring of who you actually were rather than the mask that you could adorn that would be rewarded in our culture for sure.
- [89:15]
Craig Maude
And when I was at Flipboard, every weekend, I would book a hotel in the city, and I would just go up there Friday night, and I get late checkout on Sunday, and I would just write from Friday night till Sunday.
- [89:25]
Rich Roll
That's better than just drinking in your hotel room for three days straight. That's the other version.
- [89:31]
Craig Maude
Sparkling water. I drank so much sparkling water, but yeah, it was just sparkling water. But no. So I was even in the middle of it all. I was protecting this thing that I had kind of cultivated throughout my 20s and was trying not to get pulled in these other directions and to sort of keep those values clear and apparent. But what really made it easy to make that decision was I looked around my life and everyone in my life that I loved. I had the deepest connections to even being able to work at Flipboard. All of that was connected to writing. All of that was connected to being honest with myself and focusing on the things that I felt the need to focus on. And people like Kevin Kelly, who has become one of the most important people in my life, probably he'll be really embarrassed to hear that, but Kevin is such a dear friend. And we met. Actually, I met Kevin two days after I buried my dad. And I rushed through burying my dad in order to get to the event in New York to give a talk. Because that year I moved to Palo Alto, I gave, I don't know, like, 10 or 15 talks around the world. I was just like, suddenly being invited to do these things. And again, this scarcity mindset which plagued me throughout my entire life. Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity. No value, no value, no value. They're going to find out that you're a fraud. This is all going to Go away. We have to say yes to all these things. And so I had this thing in New York with O'Reilly Media, and I, like, literally basically all but threw my dad in the ground. I was like, we gotta. I'm talking with the priest. I'm like, we gotta get this going fast. He's like, when do you need. I'm like, tomorrow. We need to have this happen. He's like, what? I'm like, yeah, we just gotta get this done. And I got to New York, I was on stage.
- [91:05]
Rich Roll
Another good scene in the biopic, by the way.
- [91:08]
Craig Maude
And I gave a talk on stage, and I got this email. Email right after. It was from Kevin Kelly. And he was like, hey, I like the things you're saying about publishing on stage there. And I was like, who is. I didn't know who he was. And I asked a friend. I was like, should I talk to this guy? And he's like, kevin Kelly? Yeah. Yeah, he talked to Kevin Kelly. And I was like, okay, hey, I'm out back. You know, come say hello. And he came over and he's like this, you know, this tiny guy, looks like he's Amish. He's got. He's a gnome. He's a little gnome. Amish gnome. And he goes, oh, yeah, so what? Publishers publishing tools should be. I was like, who is this character? And he just started inviting me to come take walks in Pacifica. You know, we'd walk along the coast.
- [91:46]
Rich Roll
This is where the walks began. Because we've done an entire podcast, we haven't talked about walking at all yet.
- [91:52]
Craig Maude
Sorry.
- [91:53]
Rich Roll
No, it's good. This is the way we do it.
- [91:55]
Craig Maude
This is where the walks begin. Kevin.
- [91:57]
Rich Roll
This is the anti clickbait. You know, we're going to delay satisfaction on the subject of walking until an hour and a half in, but go ahead. So it was Kevin who was the.
- [92:07]
Craig Maude
Inception point, and he kind of has a history of walking, and, you know, it's kind of his thing.
- [92:12]
Rich Roll
And you've gone on to do these, like, walk and talks with him, right? All over the world.
- [92:16]
Craig Maude
Yeah. In fact, Kevin and I have done four of them in the last 15 months, which is a crazy pace for us. But Kevin. Kevin has a death clock on his computer. So he's looking at Kevin every day is like looking at how many hours of life he has left, I think. So he's like, craig, I want to do more of these.
- [92:33]
Rich Roll
I want to put some pressure on you.
- [92:35]
Craig Maude
My clock's different, but it might be the same clock. We don't know. We don't know. But I appreciate it, his zeal for doing these things. But Kevin and I started putting these together about eight years ago where we invite six to eight people to walk with us somewhere around the world for a week. And we walk for seven days basically. And it's about 100k, 120k. The ideal is about 20k a day. That feels really good. It's like just enough to move your body. You can have a lot of conversations, but you can still stop and see things along the way and take breaks and stuff. And then every night we have a Jeffersonian dinner. So it's one topic, one table, one conversation. And Kevin is great because he's such an elder aura. His vibe is just this, like you don't want to offend Kevin. I find people won't say offensive things around Kevin and then Kevin will be gone and then they'll say crazy things to me. I'm like, well, you know, it's like just cause Kevin's gone doesn't mean you can say crazy things to me. But he kind of maintains this sort of like elder statesman atmosphere. And so everyone plays along and we have these three hour discussions every night about all sorts of different topics. And every day someone picks a new topic and these have become. Kevin has said these are some of the best weeks of his life. And so to be part of that for a guy like Kevin Kelly, who's lived the life he's lived is incredible.
- [93:48]
Rich Roll
And he is a tractor beam for interesting people. Right. So I would imagine the people that show up for those walks are, are already loaded to bear with all kinds of insights and experiences.
- [94:00]
Craig Maude
And we started doing those and I invite half the people and he invites half the people. And spending seven days, almost 24 hours a day, you're like 15, 16 hours a day with these people where you're walking and you're walking in twos and you keep kind of moving between little groups and stuff. And then at night you have these really profound dinner conversations to the point where, I mean, I mean there has not been a walk and talk where people aren't in tears. It's like there's some point people are sobbing to have these discussions and see how people's minds work. And all the discussions are done with an incredible amount of yo yu generosity, empathy, and so to witness that. Now for me, we've done eight or nine of them, which means two and a half months of my life have been spent around tables with these incredible humans having these deep conversations again, just creating in my mind all these archetypes for what could be. And you spend seven days with someone and that is a profoundly different experience than just getting coffee with someone. And so to be able to spend.
- [95:01]
Rich Roll
Laying on a lounge chair by a pool.
- [95:03]
Craig Maude
Exactly. And the walking is critical. That walking gives purpose to it. It moves the mind in a certain way. Without the walking, it doesn't work. And you walk into. In. So we've done Cotswolds a couple times. We walked Thailand, Chiang Mai. From the mountains down back into Chiang Mai. We walked in Bali, we walked across the island. And that one was the most intense. That one. We'll never do something like that again. But every day we get to a basically bamboo platform in the forest. And it was 10 of us and we all just slept next to each other on this bamboo platform. Did that for a week. That said, the Bali chat group is the most active chat group of all the WhatsApp groups. From all the walk and talks.
- [95:43]
Rich Roll
Well, you know, discount discomfort as a way of bonding people together.
- [95:46]
Craig Maude
But. But we just did Spain again. The Camino de Santiago is amazing. We've done Japan a couple times. But it is. It is one of the. One of the. One of the. I think the greatest things in my life. Again, ratcheting up sense of self worth and then being able to connect with these people that I've grown to. Many of them have become just such close friends, people I love.
- [96:09]
Rich Roll
It's one thing to. But do these walks as a group and as a exercise in connection and idea sharing, et cetera. It's altogether something different to decide I'm going to go on these solo walks and I'm going to go great distances. Like maybe there's a light dusting of the alcoholism thing in here. This is what I would do. I decide I'm going to run them and swim them, like push my body. But the idea of slowing down and just being with yourself in the most undistracted way for extended periods of time, as a challenge, as a. As a way of reclaiming your attention, which is something you've written a lot about, reckoning with yourself. Like the hardest walk is the walk inward, right. And giving yourself space to do that. So. So is that like a byproduct of having these nourishing experiences with Kevin and.
- [97:10]
Craig Maude
These groups or sort of in parallel? The solo walking stuff happened from another mentor that is just a dear friend who accidentally became a mentor. This guy, John McBride, who I write about in.
- [97:21]
Rich Roll
Right. The Book of John. I want to hear all about the Book of John.
- [97:24]
Craig Maude
The Book of John. But John I met almost 20 years ago now through art world connections because I had written a book about the Tokyo art world. And we got connected. And it was one of these things where we sat down for breakfast together, and then we didn't stand up until 5pm it was like one of those, like, you know, falling into just infinite conversation and just this almost like pheromonal, like, deep connection again. Like, almost like the Brian thing as, like, kids. But having that as an adult is, you know, it's kind of rare. And then we just started doing. He'd invite me, oh, I'm gonna go stay in James Turrell's House of Light with some artists. Do to. You want to come? And we started doing these things together. And then John had grew up essentially in Japan. He came when he was 16, 17, on a scholarship, went to Japanese university, is totally fluent, wrote his graduation thesis in Japanese by hand, that sort of thing. And when he was studying, he started doing all these old walks. So there's the Tokaido, there's the Nakasendo, there's Matsuo Basho, the haiku poet who. Who did the okono hosomichi, the narrow road to the north. And John, as a teenager, started walking all these alone because he wanted to understand the connection between literature and history. And so he's taking notes and his literature professor's kind of guiding him. And so John had been doing that, and then he sort of retired in his early 40s. He ran Sky TV in Japan, so launched it with Rupert Murdoch. He was the CEO when he was, like, 33. So he's one of these wonderkind sort of human beings and kind of retired. And then at 50, he was sort of looking for or, I don't know, something to go back to or reflect on. And he started doing these walks again. And he started inviting me. He's like, hey, I'm gonna. Because I was, you know, I was writing my book about my dad, which. And that, by the way, never came out. It never became a thing. But, you know, I was writing. I was freelance. I had time. And John was like, hey, come walk with me in, you know, Kumano Koto, you know, this. This path called Kumano kodo. And I was like, what's that? And so he started opening up this world, the world that's in this book. John 100% opened up to me. And we started going on these walks together, he and I. And his fluency and his yo yu, his abundance as a human being, blew me away. Like Kevin And John share a lot of that abundance in different ways. And we'd, you know, be walking these old pilgrimage paths on the key peninsula, which is the peninsula south of Kyoto and Osaka.
- [99:49]
Rich Roll
The dangling penis, as it's. It's the moist, beloved, referred to in Japan.
- [99:56]
Craig Maude
The moist, dangling penis of the Honshu. Yeah, if you look at it that way. And we'd be in the countryside walking, talking to farmers, talking to inn owners. And I started observing John. Just I'd stand back and I'd watch how he ensorceled everyone we connected with. With language. Because in Japanese, you can kind of elevate people through the verb conjugation and the word choice and through his language, through his historical knowledge, through his presence. Just the way he held himself to everyone. Where, again, it was no sense of, I'm above you, I'm looking down, even though it's a random, you know, could be a tomato farmer in the middle of nowhere. Total elevation of who he was speaking with. And watching those people flip over this kind of swing set in disbelief. Because there's like, initially, it's like, oh, my God, a white guy, this big lumbering dude. He's like six, two, and big guy John lumbers up, and you can see them freaking out, oh, my God, how am I gonna communicate with this person? And then within two seconds, they realize, oh, he's totally fluent. And then within five seconds, they realize, oh, my God, this is a really special human being. And then within 30 seconds, they are willing to do anything for us. It was like, do you want to live with me? Do you want to marry my daughter? Like, do you want, like, do you want tea? Like, anything. I mean, just. Just to watch John do that. And again, it's. It's this archetypes, and being present for archetypes and bearing witness to archetypes in action is something that Brian and I were bereft of. Right. As growing up, as kids, we had none of that. Like I always say. I say in the book, like, man, if we just had 10 minutes with someone like John when we were kids, like, how different could it have been to have just witnessed John doing this for 10 minutes? And so I, you know, you know, eternally grateful to John for inviting me on these walks. You know, I was basically 33, 34 when we started doing these and witnessing this and then from that, because I had the language skills, but I didn't know how to deploy them. And my whole thing is like, I've got this voice in the back of my head ready to fight Everybody. It's like, that's just how it was where we came from. You always have to be ready to fight, and if you didn't fight, you were going to be diminished. You were going to be snuffed out. And that voice is still there in my head. Head all the time. And so if I perceive someone to be a bully and I can be overly sensitive about this, I'm ready, like, oh, let's go to the mat. And John didn't have any of that. He comes from a place of total abundance.
- [102:22]
Rich Roll
Well, he was the mentor that you needed your entire life. Right. He's your Mr. Miyagi.
- [102:29]
Craig Maude
If you inverted Mr. Miyagi, you get John. Whatever the opposite.
- [102:32]
Rich Roll
Yeah, exactly. And we should say you keep bringing up Brian, but for the audience, the book is structured as basically an elongated, you know, letter to Brian. Yeah, like, hey, I'm going on this journey. Like, you're. You're reconciling with your grief and your guilt and all of these emotions, but you're doing it in the context of, like, sharing your experiences in a letter to this lost friend.
- [102:57]
Craig Maude
Right? Yeah. The book opens just, you know, hey, let me begin again for you, you know, Brian. And, yeah, the whole thing kind of ends up being this letter to him. Like, if I could talk to him today, what would I want to tell him about and explain, you know, and being able to, like, kind of think back on where I've gotten to in Japan. To be walking alone 700 kilometers, you know, talking to cafe owners, smoking cigarettes with these, like, jazz cafe people, to be able to get to that place from where we were and just go, brian, man, look at this. This is ridiculous. It's like, there's one passage in there where I talk about having taken Jeff Bezos on a walk. It's like he joined one of these walks randomly. I mean, it's just so surreal to have gone from where I was in the world to Jeff reaching out and being like, hey, I want to join you. I want to do a Kevin and Craig walk, and the surrealness of that. And I think writing this to Brian helped me contextualize a lot of that in a way that would have been difficult otherwise.
- [104:02]
Rich Roll
Right, right. It's a vehicle to express everything you want to say in a shorthand because you realize, like, you realize the context of it, right? Yeah, yeah. So the book of John, like, tell me this, like, worldview theory, then. Like, you're observing this charismatic person, like, insurcling people. I love that word. I'm so glad you use that. But if you had to canonize it, you know, what, what is that? How do you, how do you articulate that? That.
- [104:29]
Craig Maude
So the Book of John is this thing in this book that I talk about. So John, you know, like, we. We've done. I don't even know how many. How many walks together we've done, but we've probably traveled together 24 hours a day, sleeping in the same room. You know, like, we're basically siblings. Like, I, like, he doesn't want to be called a dad. So we travel together and people are always like, oh, dad, father and son. He's 20 years older than me, you know, father and son. Oh, that's so cute. And he gets like, really upset. He's like, I'm not his dad. You know, Know, like, not, not actually upset, but just kind of. But like, it really is sort of sibling ish, you know, that's what it feels like. And so we've spent six months, I would say, of our lives together, which is. I don't think I've spent that much time with any other human being outside of childhood. And so John, even when I'm. Even when we're not walking together, I'm walking alone. He's like, he can see me on Find My Friends or whatever, and he always knows where I am and he knows the routes I'm walking. He's walked them 50 times. Times. And so every day he's emailing me basically, PDFs of sections of books that he's written about where I'm going to be that day. Even though he's never published any of these books, he gives a lot of lectures and stuff. And so every day I'm getting this download of like, oh, Craig, hey, I see you're next to this shrine. Here's the history of. And so I call this the Book of John. I've gotten thousands of pages from John over the years. Kind of like this angel on my shoulder looking at, okay, this is where you're going to be today. These are some cool things to see. And so that's one part of the Book of John. But then the other part is just that in my mind, this voice of John, and having borne witness to him be such a human of compassion and abundance and empathy, he's going to sort of blush at all this. But it's true. He really is this person of Yo Yu, of incredible yo yo. I keep that in mind all the time. And anytime I find my mind veering to that scarcity place and that voice of fighting, of anger, Kind of being like, hey, man, brushes off. Hey, we're ready to go whenever you want to go. I kind of refer back to the aura of the Book of John, which is just putting a little more energy, assume the best, try to elevate that person on the other side before you go to that place of scarcity.
- [106:40]
Rich Roll
He gives you the facts. But it's really a vibe check.
- [106:42]
Craig Maude
It totally is. Vibe check.
- [106:43]
Rich Roll
That's what it is. Right. And so what is the book Book of Craig, though? Because it's got to have its departure points from. I know you're not a strict constructionist. Well, the book, the Book of John.
- [106:56]
Craig Maude
The Book of Craig is a super, super in progress. I mean, it is less history focused. That's just not my thing. I'm not able to retain facts. I like history in the sense of giving me a little bit of confidence, context. But for me, what I get out of these walks and the reason why I don't do nature walks, why all my walks are like village to village or they have to pass through villages. And that's why with the Kumano Kodo, the walk of the Kumano Kodo that I like the most is called the Iseiji. And that's a walk that few people do, but it is the walk that it touches mountains, it touches the coast, it touches logging villages, fishing villages. You feel this kind of salt of the earthiness of people all along that walk. And so for me, as I'm doing these walks, I want to talk to as many people, I want to bear witness to as much life being lived as possible. And for me, I'm just collecting like a weird squirrel, like little archetypes of possibility. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like. This is what life can be like. Oh, you can have a good life in this context. Oh, in this context, you can have a good life. And for me, those stories, the conversations I have with people, that is what it is. For me. It's bearing witness to possibilities of how to live and how to live. Well.
- [108:13]
Rich Roll
What would you say is the core takeaway or thesis that you've extracted from these many experiences? The through line?
- [108:24]
Craig Maude
Well, I mean, I really do believe that social safety nets create an abundance that allows for the most interesting lives to be lived.
- [108:35]
Rich Roll
Because if you know you're going to be okay, then you have the calmness and the.
- [108:40]
Craig Maude
Well, you can take risks.
- [108:41]
Rich Roll
Yeah, you have more freedom to be yourself and to do the things you want to do.
- [108:46]
Craig Maude
So I've done a lot of These big kind of historical countryside walks. But I've also done kind of iterations. I've been like, oh well, how can we do walks differently? So one thing I did was I picked 10, what you call flyover cities, like Japanese flyover cities. So places you would never go to necessarily, because there's nothing particularly special about these cities. But I kind of picked them from Hokkaido all the way down to Kagoshima. And I tried to walk 50 km in each city. That was my goal. So I'd go to them, I'd spend three nights and I'd try to walk 50K. And if you try to walk 50K, you're going to touch almost every street in the city and you're going to end up talking to people and all this stuff. And I started in Hakodate, I went to Morioka South, Takata, Matsumoto, Tsuruga, Onomichi, Yamaguchi, Karatsu in Saga, in Ehime, I went to a city and then I ended in Kagoshima. So I went to these 10 cities and I just started talking with folks. And most of these places are very countryside. And most of the Japanese countryside is depopulating. Shutter, it's called Shatagai. So shutter streets. So all the shopping streets are just shut up, cluttered. The shops are all closed. You don't see kids anywhere. You don't see independent businesses thriving. And in doing these 10 cities that I kind of picked almost at random, one of these cities in particular, Mordioca, I went and it was just abundance upon abundance. It just freaked me out. I was like, why has literally no one ever said to me in 23 years by that point, you should go to Morioca, it's cool. It was just cafes, amazing cafes and bakeries. And the cityscape was wonderful to walk. And there's this huge park in the middle that the castle used to sit on. And there's 16th generation iron workers doing these amazing pots. And the 15th generation was the current guy's mom, who's this super cool, strong woman. And I was just like, why has no one talked about this place? And so a couple years ago, New York Times came to me. I write for the them freelance sometimes they came to me and said, hey, we're doing our 52 places you should go to this year for 2023. Do you have somewhere to recommend? And I was like, yeah, sure, I like Morioca. Super cool. Let me just recommend. And you kind of write this little paragraph. It was probably like 200 words. You write, I submit it. I'm like, guys, this really is a great city. Truly, please, I hope you consider it for the list. And they don't tell you where it's going to come in the list. And they go, okay, it's going to be on the list. So you're like, okay, it'll be 30, 40 out of 52, something like that. And the list comes out in January 2023. And number one is London, because the queen had died and there's like all this stuff was happening, there's a coronation happening. And then number two was Morioca.
- [111:32]
Rich Roll
I didn't know it was number two. I knew that you wrote that article and that it blew up and it created like a whole thing.
- [111:37]
Craig Maude
It was two. And everyone in Japan just went. It was like the record scratched across the needle, scratched across the record across the whole country. And they were just like, what, like London, then Morioca?
- [111:51]
Rich Roll
What is the population of this city?
- [111:53]
Craig Maude
It's like a hundred thousand, A couple hundred thousand. I mean, it's not like Podunk, Mississippi or whatever. It's like there are people there, they're.
- [112:03]
Rich Roll
Erecting statues, town square.
- [112:06]
Craig Maude
Well, it was crazy because everyone was in shock. And then this one guy in the city who runs this old soba shop, he just went, this is insane. We need to use this to promote the city. And he started pushing it. He started reaching out to media contacts and was like, hey, he's like, I think Craig speaks Japanese too. Like the guy who wrote this article. And so then suddenly it was just like I was in the middle of.
- [112:30]
Rich Roll
A giant media figure in Japan.
- [112:33]
Craig Maude
Yeah, it went from I had literally never spoken on TV or radio or anything before to I've now done like hundreds of TV shows and, you know, radio shows, newspapers, magazines, everything. And, you know, they invited me up there, they're like, hey, you should come up. The mayor wants to meet you. You know, and I'm just like, okay, this will be interesting. I can do like a follow up piece to the New York Times. Like, you know, how's Morioka doing? And I thought they didn't tell me anything, Anything. You know, I'm like, I'm gonna go into a little room like this, gonna shake the mayor's hand, be like, oh, you know, hey, nice to meet you. Like, let me know if I can help. Like, you know, use this to the, to your advantage, please. And I walk in and they open the doors and it was like a scene from a movie. It was like just all like the, like the whole thing, it was just all giant, like network TV cameras. Like, you Know, rapid fire paparazzi, like, you know. You know, And I was just like, what the. What is going on? I. I haven't prepared a speech. I haven't prepared anything. They bamboozled me. They totally did the bamboozle on me. And so I walk in, they lead me to the mayor. He's sitting on a throne, and so I sit next to him. It was just so ridiculous. And we shake hands, and the mayor basically goes. He's like, thanks, Craig. Okay, I'm out of here. Take it from here. And he just left me with all of this media. And I truly, I had not prepared a speech for these people. I hadn't prepared anything. And they start asking me questions and they're like, moto San, how do we solve poverty? And I'm just like, guys, guys, I don't. Hold on. I just think you have really good coffee shops. I don't know how to solve poverty. I am so sorry. I think I'm not the guy. You respect it. But anyway, it was. It was insane. Like, I'd walk down the street, people would stop their car and scream, you know, like, I'd walk into a. Someone take me to, like, a restaurant. Everyone would stand up and start clapping and, like, buy me. Try to buy me drinks and stuff, you know, and it was just being stopped on the street for selfies. And I mean, it was just. It was like, okay, this is how, you know, a list celebrities feel everywhere they go in the world. And I could see, like, this would drive you insane. This would make you a crazy person if this, like, really happened at this level everywhere. But it was funny. And what I was able to do from it. And the reason why I said yes to all the media wasn't because I was like, oh, my ego wasn't like, oh, my God, finally we've arrived. And this is what we've been waiting for our whole life is zero, absolute zero of that. In fact, it was really difficult for me to do a lot of this stuff. But what I saw was a moral obligation to explain, why did I pick this city? And these people were just dumbfounded. What do we do with this now? And so I wanted them to get the most positive that they could rest from this as possible. And I felt a moral duty to explain to them, why is your city great? What's cool about it? Because they were all just like, why our city is boring. It's like a middle of nowhere, nothing town. And so going on a lot of these radio shows and TV shows, people would be like, what is it? About Morioca that you liked and how many bowls of soba did you eat? That's what they're obsessed with.
- [115:35]
Rich Roll
And I was like, they must have the best noodles. And are there some secret there that you've unlocked?
- [115:41]
Craig Maude
Yeah. And my answer was national health insurance. That's what they've got. It was like national health insurance combined with a little bit of good infrastructure. So the Shinkansen stop happens to be there. So that injects with a little bit of life, but just having. Because everything I loved about Morioko was independent business. So it was this jazz place that's been doing Japanese jazz for 50 years. They were the progenitor of building a jazz cafe around Japanese jazz. They were the only one doing it, and they got heckled for it, and they just stuck to their guns. And it was one of these things where there's a certain kind of business that can't exist in Tokyo because there's just too much influence. But just enough outside the city where the cost of living is really low, where you're taken care of, you can have a family, you can run a small bookshop that becomes this community center. Morioka is just full of that. And that was what I loved about it.
- [116:33]
Rich Roll
And this is what we all want on our main street that has completely vanished from modernity.
- [116:39]
Craig Maude
Yes. So it is a city of Main Street. It's just every street you walk. There's a tatami maker. Here's a great bookshop. Here's another cafe. Here's a cafe that's been open for 55 years. Here's one that's been open for three years. Here's. Oh, the daughter of this old one's opening a new one over here. It's like there's this energy and community that comes from this Yo Yu. This abundance that is so heartening. And that's, I think, why I was so moved by it. And it was difficult to explain to Japanese media because I'm like, well, I come from this traumatized place of scarcity, you know, it's like. And I'm like, saying this in media and I'm like, going to a city like Morioka heals me. It's like literally healing me to walk the streets to feel this abundance, to feel that this is possible. Because I'm collecting this archetype of you can live like this. You can have a city like this.
- [117:23]
Rich Roll
What would it be like to be able to have a cool business and not live in fear of, like, never being able to pay the rent or pay the bill and Just be able to, like, celebrate and enjoy it for what it is without thinking about, like, how it has to scale to 10 cities, for sure.
- [117:40]
Craig Maude
And so in Morioca, you've got one coffee guy who is revered all across the country. He was actually one of the first people to import. I think it's called Probot. It's like. It's like a classic German roaster machine, giant machine. And, you know, it's like he just got really into coffee and started doing this stuff. And he was able to do it because rent was really low. No one was going to raise the rent on him. And even after all this attention, it's not like I've destroyed the city now.
- [118:07]
Rich Roll
But I'm sure there was a profound economic impact. Do you have a sense of, like, have they been able to tally?
- [118:14]
Craig Maude
I mean, there's some estimates, but. But it's probably somewhere around, like, 100 million plus of positive economic impact.
- [118:22]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [118:22]
Craig Maude
So 200 words led to 100 million.
- [118:25]
Rich Roll
So maybe they did say, now we can move to Tokyo. That's the American. The American thing was like, now we can get out of here and go to Tokyo.
- [118:31]
Craig Maude
But my. My thing was like, you know, all these political groups were asking me to give talks at, like, rallies and stuff like that. I said no to everything. All I want to. For me, the most important generation, the most important demographic to speak to is teenagers and people in their early 20s. And so the biggest thing I wanted people to take away from this was for teenagers to feel pride in where they came from. And so you leave and then you think about coming back to build on this greatness that's already there. And so to me, that was the most important thing. So talking to politicians in their 60s and 70s, to me, was pointless. That was just idiotic. Even if they were going to pay well, I was like, I don't. And also, like, you don't want to touch that world. But talking to young kids, talking to, you know, I'm happy to do that until I'm blue in the face.
- [119:15]
Rich Roll
Another aspect of these walks is connecting with. I mean, that's a story of resilience to celebrate. But there's this impermanence aspect. Like, this peninsula is in decline and in decay and has had to suffer all these. Was it like the hurricane that destroyed it? So it's sort of littered with relics and wreckage that connects you with, like, the impermanence of all things, Right?
- [119:45]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [119:45]
Rich Roll
And. And. And when you walk this, you're in this deeply reflective state where you're, like, reflecting on your own life and perhaps reflecting on the impermanence of all things as a result of what you're seeing and experiencing. But at the same time you're like writing and you're like collecting all these knickknacks and you're, you know, curating and like, you know, so there's a, there's a hoarding aspect to this.
- [120:08]
Craig Maude
I like that, I like that description.
- [120:10]
Rich Roll
It's kind of like, you know, in conflict with that.
- [120:13]
Craig Maude
Hoarding. Yeah, hoarding stories. Yeah. But part of the hoarding element is you feel it disappearing so rapidly. So it's gone. Ten years from now. Most of these people I'm speaking to are dead. They're gone, the shops are gone, they're kisses.
- [120:27]
Rich Roll
That's what they're called. These like cafes. There's nobody in them. Right.
- [120:32]
Craig Maude
It's fake. There's very few people.
- [120:33]
Rich Roll
It's existing for the few people who might, might come in. They're regulars.
- [120:38]
Craig Maude
Exactly. A few regulars who happen to still be alive. And most of the time the owners own the property so they don't have to worry about rent and they just go there. But in these really down and out, economically depressed areas where it's been totally depopulated, all the kids have gone to Nagoya or Osaka for the jobs. That's where the jobs are again. It's just like you get rid of the blue collar opportunities. A lot of the lumber, a lot of the fishing has gone to China. So these industries just aren't what they used to be be. And even on the peninsula. I went down for a 10 day photo shoot in February this year and I go to the raw tuna market and they let me on the tuna boats. It's four in the morning. All the people working are Indonesian, all Indonesian. You can't find Japanese people who will work for this pay that makes it sustainable. Even the Indonesians are having a hard time. They're having a hard time finding them because Indonesia has come up economically so much in the last 20 years, 30 years, that even for Indonesians it's like this isn't really enough pay. So it's difficult. So the jobs aren't there. And so you have this really thin relic of a past culture, a past way of life that truly we are witnessing it in real time, wink out of existence. And so that kind of hoarding desperation element of getting these stories, talking to these people, I think just comes from the fact that I know in 10 years it's all gone. And if I can just capture a small element of what was through their Stories and doing these sketches essentially of people like the okonomiyaki lady who's never been on the Shinkansen before. And then she tells me about her one ride on the Shinkansen. It's like, I want to capture that because it really will disappear.
- [122:17]
Rich Roll
There's an endurance aspect of it, also a suffering. And these are difficult feats. You're going for hundreds of miles and many, many, many days. And also the asceticism of it. Like, there's no iPhone, you're not listening to podcasts and music, you're on a very restricted information diet. And it's intended to be sort of a semi vipassana, moving meditation experience.
- [122:49]
Craig Maude
For sure. Yeah. I started setting these rules again, almost like intuitively, like, okay, what if we set these boundaries? And how would that feel? No social media, no news, so I'm not allowed to look at the New York Times or anything, or read other news sites. No music, no podcasts, basically nothing that teleports you out of the moment, which so much of what the phone is is essentially a teleportation device out of discomfort, small discomforts. So you're on the subway commuting, oh, I don't want to be on the subway train. Let me play Candy Crush or whatever. It's like we bristle at any kind of discomfort now. So a part of it is, is the asceticism of leaning into these discomforts, but also getting rid of all that ratchets up your attention. It really just kind of like cranks up the focus. You start to see things you wouldn't see otherwise. And because you're so bored for most of it, you're desperate to connect with people. So it's like this sort of forcing function to get you to talk to people. And I have another rule, like you have to take a portrait of someone by 10 in the morning and it'll be like 9:30. And I'll be like, oh man, I haven't taken a portrait yet. And so I'll just run into a random shop and be like, hey, can I take your picture? And again, that just catalyzes a human connection. And so on these walks, I'm just filled with this abundance of connecting with people, strangers. And again, when you have a great interaction with a stranger and it feels magical. And there's been this weird thing now that I'm like a TV person and I've been on the radio, it's like, I'll meet people and they'll be like, I saw you on tv, this thing. And so that's the walking guy. That's the walking guy. And so that adds another, like they're really excited about that. But anyway, it's this clearly mutually joyful thing that happens. But I'm doing that while walking 30 km, 40 km, day after day after day after day for weeks on end. And then every night I get to an inn or a hotel or whatever and I'll sit down and I write for three, four, five hours. I'm editing the photos for the day. I'm writing 2, 3, 4,000 words and then I'm putting them together. I'm trying to create this kind of visual, literary narrative. And oftentimes I'll run a newsletter, a pop up newsletter that starts and ends for the duration of the walk. And I'll send that out to the people who are out there. And that for me, knowing there's a little bit of an audience out there on the other side, because you've talked about this, you don't want to get up and do that run. You're like, ah, let me skip today or whatever. And after walking for eight hours, after doing 45k, you get to an inn, you don't want to write for three hours. So it's about that duality of using the body up as much as possible and then using the mind up as much as possible at night and proving to yourself that you've got so much extra juice in you than you may think you have. And I would say doing day after day after day after day for weeks and now months and now years, I've been doing this has proven to me that if you sit me down and say you've got three hours to write this essay, you can do it it and you can pull something interesting out of it. And if you don't pull something interesting out of it, the onus is on you, not on the day.
- [125:43]
Rich Roll
And you have this audience that's waiting for it, that has an expectation that you're going to deliver.
- [125:48]
Craig Maude
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [125:49]
Rich Roll
How do you think about the relationship between the discomfort of it and the creative expression of it? Like, how does the discomfort drive the deeper self inquiry and the heightened level of attention to your environment?
- [126:07]
Craig Maude
Well, I mean, I think the physicality, again, mood follows action, right? It's like, I think the physicality of it makes it so every day on a walk like this, I already feel like just having done the walk itself, like I've won the day in a weird way. And so it puts me in just such a positive state of mind. And again, it Almost feels like spiritual, almost like theological. This just the walking from point to point in and of itself. And a lot of it, you know, there'll be elevation gains and dissensions and stuff like that. And so I mean, some days I might be doing, you know, 3,4000 meters of climbing with this big pack on. I'm carrying three cameras, my laptop, and you know, changes of clothes and stuff. So it's like a non trivial amount of weight. So it's really physical. I mean, my body whittles down by the end of these walks, like it just feels great. And so I think that that physicality and walking, you know, throughout history people have said, oh, walking helps me think. And you know, Einstein, all these great thinkers used to have their daily walks. And that was when they would problem solve. And for me, when I turn everything off and I don't have the distractions, I don't have the teleportation, my mind immediately goes into writing mode. That's what fills the space. When my mind has like an expanse of boredom that opens up, expanse of yo yu. My mind immediately goes into a place of writing, synthesizing in a really positive way. And so I dictate. You can kind of just use like an airpod and dictate and have it append to a note in Apple notes. So I don't have to look at my phone, I don't have to touch, I don't, I really don't want to touch the phone. But I dictate throughout the day as I'm walking. And by the end of the day I'll have 10,000 words or whatever in this note. And then I use that as the jumping off point, but that in the real moment, synthesizing and thinking about. And then when you do this day after day after day, you start to recognize patterns that you would otherwise miss. And even if you have one other person, which is one of the reasons I don't do these with John, is because even just having one other person teleports you out of that moment. And so the walks with Kevin, for example, with eight or 10 people, those are about the talks. It's not really about the walk. And the walk is kind of a platform on top of which the talking happens. I can't tell you anything about the Camino de Santiago because we're just talking the whole time.
- [128:12]
Rich Roll
Yeah, I think there's something about being in a persistent state of elevated heart rate. Like just mildly elevated heart rate. This is zone 2, like even below zone. I mean, if you're walk like you have a pack. You're walking like it's rigorous. Is that zone two? It's like maybe it's high zone one, I don't know. But like elevated enough so that you're not at rest and sufficient enough to unlock the unconscious mind in a way that other things don't really. Like you're. You're suddenly able to kind of free associate and synthesize those ideas. And that's why when I'm out running, it's like, yeah, I have to stop and dictate something, you know, like, because I'll. I'll forget get if I don't do it. But there's a tension between that part, like the creative mind doing its thing and the being present and paying attention, which is kind of why you're there also. Right. Like those two things are at odds with each other.
- [129:09]
Craig Maude
Right? Well, there's.
- [129:10]
Rich Roll
How do you balance that out? Because you're there to like, you want to see these things and really be present with what you're observing. And then there's the reflective aspect of that.
- [129:19]
Craig Maude
I think they're less at odds and just more in conversation with one another and they kind of build off each other. And so the more I'm able to allow myself to enter in this state of reflection in real time. Because you do forget so fast. Like, these things are like, I'll have a conversation with someone, they're completely ephemeral.
- [129:36]
Rich Roll
And you think you're going to remember.
- [129:37]
Craig Maude
You'Re not going to remember. You've got to. If you've ever done any field work, like design field work, research, like I did research in Myanmar 10 years ago where I was going out there to with a NGO to help farmers farm better. And we've tried to figure out how to distribute information better. But one of the takeaways was you do this field research and then immediately, as soon as you're done, after you've met the farm, you have to write it all down, everything. Because even an hour later you forget half of it. The half life of memory is so quick. So I'll have a conversation and I'll just be like, that turn of phrase is the greatest thing I've heard all day. And I just have to get that down as quickly as possible. But to me it really does. It feels like it's almost heightening the attention by doing that. Because it's like we're looking for these, these kind of hooks, these snippets to build the narrative around. And it feels healthy. I mean, those walks and the writing I do and the photography I do, those are some of the richest creative days of my life. Of my life, for sure.
- [130:36]
Rich Roll
From a meta view of it. To me, it feels like these experiences are connecting you with yourself. They're connecting you with the land. They're connecting you with these other. With these people. They're connecting you with the past, your past and the past of this foreign land that you've adopted. So there's a sense of oneness, right?
- [131:01]
Craig Maude
Well, and also one of the complex things about. About being an immigrant to Japan and you look like me is you're never gonna be part of Japan. Never ever gonna accept you. You're never gonna be a Japanese person. And that's not the desire necessarily. But I do think one of what I was looking for around, like, 2013, when I went back was, why am I here? What can I do that is additive to both me and the place and not look for something from the place to give to me. I think a lot of people who emigrate to Japan then become disillusioned with it or angry at Japan is because they want something from it. They expect Tokyo to respect them in some way or the country to give them something. Look, I'm committing to you. Why don't you commit back to me? But that's a very dangerous place to be in. And I think I was able to go back and in doing these walks with John, I kind of realized, wow, this is really special. Has the historical component of it. I'm able to use the language. Language. I'm able to do this thing that to me feels important just as a human, like collecting these archetypes of ways of life and then being able to share them in a way that's meaningful with others. Amplify that sort of present this part of Japan that people don't have access to. This book is a whole set of stories that no one will ever be able to experience. For the most part. It's like very, very few people in the world will be able to go to these areas. And I think that helped me find. Find a purpose of being there in a way that 13 years ago was important for me to find.
- [132:33]
Rich Roll
How do you know when you're using these walks to integrate as opposed to escape? Can you catch yourself? Have there been occasions where you're like, oh, now I'm the walking guy, so I can just go and do one of these walks. But actually what I really want to do is just not deal with this other part of my life. Life, or I mean, they Listen, they feel deeply integrative and very intentional. So I'm not presuming that you're doing this, but I just know for myself, I can sort of make an argument like, I'm going to go do this thing. And it's easy to not be honest with myself about what maybe my attention probably should. It would be better attuned to that. I'm just kind of avoiding.
- [133:16]
Craig Maude
I am so paranoid. I mean, I am. I am so pathologically paranoid again. It's like that scarcity mindset thing. I'm like, I'm gonna lose all my money. I'm gonna have to move back to where I came from. I'm gonna have to. That's always there. That voice is always there. And the paranoia also goes in this direction of, are we escaping too much? Are we using this as a crutch? Are we. You know? So I'm constantly coming back to that, revisiting it, like, making sure, are we doing something new with this or not? Which is why I kind of did the 10 cities thing. Thing. I was like, let's mix it up. Let's start to find, instead of just walking an old historical route linearly, like, what if we did this other thing? What if we did this? And I think with the media stuff in the last two years, that came out of left field, and I've kind of leaned into that. And that's kind of added another layer of richness to it all and purpose to the walks as well. And so it feels right now, pretty healthy. And at the same time, I was in this relationship. I'm no longer with the mom, but I have a stepdaughter.
- [134:16]
Rich Roll
Right, so you still have a relationship with her?
- [134:18]
Craig Maude
With stepdaughter. Incredible, deep relationship with a stepdaughter. And I don't even like to call her stepdaughter. In Japanese, it's giri musume. Giri no musume. And I had someone yell at me the other day. They're just like, don't use that phrase. Because in English, stepchild is so common. But in Japanese, there is something, I guess, that feels pejorative about it. And I've come in English, too, to be like, I don't know if I want to use step kid anymore. So I just kind of call her my daughter, even though she's 100% Japanese, and she is 15 now. And as I was starting to do all these walks, she was 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And I was more and more this kind of force in her life. And I never Grew up with reconciliation, witnessing that. And, and I carried with me until very recently. And it's still there, I'm sure, the sense that people could, anyone could throw me away. And I started, you know, I do these walks. I'd come back home, you know, spend a bunch of time with her. And as I'm walking, we're videoing, you know, FaceTiming every night or whatever. And I would come back and we'd have like, little fights, you know, like, she like stopped going to school for a while and like, you know, I'd kind of spray her with a water bottle or something. Like, you know, just try to like, get her up in the morning. Like, you just don't know, like, get up, go to school. And she would get really mad at me and wouldn't talk to me for like two weeks. And the first time that happened, I, I thought I was gonna die because I was like, oh, okay, she's done with me. She, she doesn't need me. She's throwing me away. This is just, this is just what happens in our life. This little, this 8 year old, 9 year old, she's done with me. We're not connecting my blood. She doesn't really see. See me as a dad. She's just gonna throw me away way. And what I realized, this is obvious in hindsight, was she really wanted to reconcile. And I didn't have the toolkit to do that. She didn't as an 8 year old, she doesn't have the toolkit to do that. And finally I found, I started talking with people and talking with a therapist and whatever and just found these kind of modalities to begin to reconcile with her and just immediately realized not only was she so grateful to reconcile, like, she so desperately wanted me in her life. And so, you know, we'd get a little more. Little fights and reconcile more quickly. And that that loop started closing and closing and closing. And then I realized more and more like, holy crap, like, I am such a force for good in this girl's life, you know, to the point where I think I'm probably the only dad in Japan where when she got her period, she ran out with her bloody underwear and showed me. She was like, she was, she was like, I got it. I got my period.
- [136:53]
Rich Roll
Yeah, the first instinct is to go to dad.
- [136:55]
Craig Maude
Yeah. You know, because we had sort of, we had sort of destigmatized, you know, we knew it was coming and it was like, let's talk about this and not make it be this like, stigmatized thing, you Know, and then I don't think she realized it was going to happen forever. I think she thought it just like happened once and it was done. And then once she realized it was like, oh my God, this is going to happen every month. She had like a breakdown and we had to like, you know, like console her, you know, it's like that. I kind of understand the, the trauma of like young girls now a little bit better having witnessed that, but the fact that like, she's had so much trust directed towards me and now, you know, I, I got her into boarding school, she's studying in New Zealand now, and I brought her down in January. We went together and it was just me and her and, you know, going to school and being like, you know, oh yeah, I'm the dad is my daughter. And having everyone kind of like do a second look for a second, but then just, just accept it. And then all the other kids who were not white asking her, oh, are you half da da da. And kind of bringing them into her fold, her into their fold. But being able to go down there and witness that and be present for that and help catalyze that, the level of self worth. No one and no other act in my life is giving me more value than my daughter. And those interactions that we've had together and the mutual growth we've had together, that's been so profound.
- [138:10]
Rich Roll
I don't know, man, there's this through line of adoption that just runs through everything here, you know.
- [138:16]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [138:19]
Rich Roll
Being adopted, adopting a new country. And then I mean, formerly you didn't adopt your stepdaughter, but like that's what it is. It's that dynamic, it's that relationship.
- [138:30]
Craig Maude
Well, it's funny, I'm, you know, I'm paying for school and just because I.
- [138:35]
Rich Roll
Can, you know, in all manner, you've adopted this girl.
- [138:40]
Craig Maude
But people, you know, up until now, up until I said, oh yeah, I'm paying for school. You know, that's the thing that people go, oh, you're really her dad? You know, it's like this weird, like the financial thing, once it kicks in that like somehow legitimizes you in a strange way. But she sees me, she calls me dad. You know, it's like we do a FaceTime call and someone asks, who are you talking to? I'm talking to my dad, you know, so, you know, I want to honor that. And as an adoptive person, I think it's very easy for me to honor.
- [139:07]
Rich Roll
That in trying to make peace with this. You did seek out your biological Parents, though. I know there's a story here.
- [139:13]
Craig Maude
I did, yeah. The adoption papers said, and this is the only information I had was my mom was 13 when she got pregnant, and my dad had been in a car accident. And then there was a murder at the site of the car accident then. So he was murdered, like in a fight. So as a kid, right? So as an adopted kid, you are the butt of all jokes on tv. Oh, you know, like, that's whenever you want to rank on someone, put someone down, you say, oh, you're probably adopted, right? Like, you see this on, like, sitcoms and stuff. Oh, this is our adopted step, you know, the redheaded step kid or whatever. And so knowing that, oh, my dad was murdered in this car accident, and then my mom was 13 and that. So I concocted this terrible story to protect myself where I'm like, oh, my mom was probably a prostitute and she was a drug addict. It said she smoked weed or whatever. I was like, had taken Valium. And so my whole story that I told myself as a kid, young kid, and then as a teenager was, oh, you come from violence, you come from a place of pain where you're an accident. They didn't want you. And the circumstances were terrible. That was. Was essentially my whole identity, origin story, identity. And then being adopted into this family where they divorce immediately, and there's all these other kind of complexities of the town. It's just like, it was very hard. You understand why I carry all this scarcity with me. But a few years ago, it's 23andMe ancestry.com, stuff like that. It was mostly because for my daughter, I wanted to know if I had any medical issues I should be be paying more attention to. That was really what catalyzed me looking for my birth parents and that kind of genetic history. It wasn't, oh, I need this person in my life. I want to connect with this person. There was none of that. And part of that may be because my adoptive parents did not give me permission to do that either. I think it's really complicated. Adoption is so complicated because the adoptive parents in some ways almost want to make their believe that you're not adopted. And the more we talk about it, the less they'll think of us as real parents. So that's scary to them. So they don't ever want to give you permission to go search for your biological parents. Right. In a weird way, because maybe if I give too much permission, then they can throw me away. The complexities, it's a minefield so understanding.
- [141:31]
Rich Roll
That at some point this person is going to want to find that out, but interpreting that as a threat or a kind of a statement about, about their, you know, how well they've parented you 100%.
- [141:44]
Craig Maude
And it's really hard. It's a really hard line to walk. I have so much empathy for everyone involved in the equation. But a couple years ago I was like, okay, I want to be around for my daughter. And that was like actually the first time I felt a sense of purpose to live beyond 40 too. And the book stuff started working out and the walk started working out. And I run a membership program and the members were sending me lots of really positive things. I have a file on my computer called you're not a piece of shit txt and I put anytime someone sends me a nice email, I copy and paste it, put it in the you're not a piece of shit doesn't just.
- [142:19]
Rich Roll
Have some giant TXT file with.
- [142:22]
Craig Maude
It's huge now. It's very, I'm delighted to say it's big, but it was the first time I was like, okay, I should try to actively try to live longer than certainly I thought I was going to live in my 20s. And so anyway, I did ancestry. We connected on there. I maintained anonymity, so it was my birth mom and I matched. But on ancestry you can be completely anonymous. And so I stayed anonymous because I was like, first of all, I was also paranoid. I was like, is this person going to be debt riddled and are they going to own a bunch of AR15s and are we going to be able to talk about anything? And the last thing I needed was another adult. The mind of a child in the shape of an adult in my life, which I feel like I'd grow grown up with so many of those in my periphery. And I was like, I just can't be another surrogate parent to an adult here. And so I was like, all right, let me maintain as much distance as possible. And it was like 50% overlap. It was like obvious this was my mom. And I saw her name and I was able to google her and kind of stalk her and all that stuff. I was like, okay, that's enough. That's kind of all. I don't really need to know more than this. And as soon as I did that, as soon as we matched, I saw her Facebook page got like shut down. And like, I thought, okay, maybe she didn't want a match or you know, maybe her family had her do it. And she was kind of Reluctant, but didn't want to talk about me. And so maybe she doesn't want me to connect and doesn't want me to know who she is. And so I just stepped back. I said, that's fine. I don't need her in my life. I don't. I'm in a place I feel great about who I am. I don't need this. And so for a year, we didn't communicate at all, didn't message on Ancestry. And then a year later, she messaged me, me this short little message that said, all you saw about me was male, like, 42 in Japan. That's all it said. And so it was, like, a little bit confusing to her, like, why is this guy in Japan? But it's like 50% overlap of DNA. It was obvious that we were like, mother, child. And she sent me this little message that just said, I think we related. It was, like, bad grammar. It had no punctuation. It was very weird. And I was like, oh, oh, come on. Asking me to do the heavy lifting again in this. Obviously, we're related. Obviously. I'm 13 years younger than you. I am your child. You had when you were 13. There's no other option. And so I sat with that for three months and didn't respond. And finally I was like, all right, what would I want to hear if I was her? And I wrote this again, anonymous response on Ancestry, where I was just like, hey, it wasn't the best circumstances, but look, I've been able to create this life of abundance and joy, and I'm able to do these things, and it's been really amazing, and I can't imagine how hard it was for you to do the things you did to give me this life when you were 13. And I just want to say thank you for that. And I'm doing really well, and I just want to let you know that. Still anonymous. And then no response from her. And then three months later, and I'm just like, oh, my God, all right, she's hopeless, or whatever. And then three months later, I get this tidal wave of messages from her. These two 3,000 word, beautiful essays, like, beautifully written essays. Oh, my God. I don't have email notifications on for Ancestry. I didn't see this message until now. I feel so stupid. Oh, my God, I'm so sorry I've made you wait three months. Da, da, da. And just this incredible emotional intelligence on the page. Really shocking. And I was sharing it with a couple writer friends, and they were just like, wow, she's A really good writer.
- [145:45]
Rich Roll
You know, like, it's coming into focus.
- [145:47]
Craig Maude
It's coming into focus. And I. I was in this really busy period of my life. This was 15 months ago. Super busy period. I got a MRSA infection in my arm. I was in the hospital. I was. I had a book coming out. I had all this stuff going on, and she's sending me these, like, incredible essays, and I didn't have the yo yo in my Anything to respond, and I kind of didn't. And then two weeks later, she sends me another giant essay, beautifully written about, like, all the animals she grew up with. And this is what your grandfather used to do. And. And he died, 51, of colon cancer. I was like, great, I'm going to get a colonoscopy next year. It's like all this stuff kind of coming together. And again, I didn't have the time to respond, but I felt so guilty. And now I'm like, oh, great. Now I'm making two moms in the world feel bad because I'm not sending enough messages. And I sent a quick little message. I said, hey, look, I'm so overwhelmed right now. Thank you for these messages. These are so wonderful. I'll get back to you in the new year. And then I didn't get back to her. And then I was on a walk with Kevin. We were in Bali. We're sitting on our bamboo platform. And I kind of told them in the update, I'm like, this is where things are with mom, with birth mom. And Kevin just goes, craig, just go have lunch with her. And I go, no. And then, like, two weeks later, I was like, you know what? And I went on Ancestry. I said, hey, I'm going to be in Chicago on this date. Do you want to get lunch? She goes, absolutely. I'll make a reservation. Let's see you here at 11:30. And just set it up. Went out. I'm nervous because it's just. I don't know what's going to happen. Are we going to, like, spontaneously combust when we, you know, we hug? Or I, who. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I felt a couple things. One was like, I was like, I don't need this to go well. Like, I don't need this to be perfect. I don't need this person in my life. Like, I just see this as kind of like an interesting adventure. Let's just go meet this person, see what that feels like. Like, just kind of go into the. In that state of mind. And then the second Thing I felt, and I thank my daughter for this, being able to feel this way was, she is so lucky to meet me today. Like, this person that I am going to meet her. Wow. She's lucky to meet this person in a way, in like a totally non narcissistic, non egotistical way. Just like, holy shit, I'm proud of who I am. And I'm so happy to be this person for her when we finally first get to meet.
- [148:11]
Rich Roll
And to be in that healthy state of not needing it to go a certain way or for her to perceive you in any way. You don't need anything from her that allows for the openness, Nothing.
- [148:25]
Craig Maude
And so I walk up to the steakhouse and she's there. I knew everything about her. She didn't know my name still.
- [148:31]
Rich Roll
Oh, you did. You put your coding to work to do a little sleuthing.
- [148:38]
Craig Maude
So I knew everything. I knew where she worked, I knew her ex husband, everything. And I was like, hello, hi, I'm your son. We gave each other a hug and went into the steakhouse, sat down in a booth. And the first thing she does is she pulls out a photo of me as a baby that the adoption agency must have given her her. And she goes, I've been carrying this my whole life. And every year on your birthday, I think about who you might have become, I pray for your happiness, I think about what kind of family you might have. And I'm just like, that is not what I expected to be the first thing to come out of her mouth. Yeah. And in that moment, immediately, I just. Just start to feel this rewiring happening. Even now, saying this, my brain is like tingling. It was like literal tingling of the brain of neurons of this narrative I'd concocted of scarcity, of violence, of pain. And the more she talked, the more she said, oh, no, the pregnancy wasn't planned. Your dad, by the way, he's alive. He lives in Florida.
- [149:55]
Rich Roll
So that was all bullshit.
- [149:56]
Craig Maude
She's like, he was 22, I was 13. That's statutory rape. But it was completely consensual. And I didn't want to deal with courts, so I just picked a guy who'd been murdered out of the newspaper and said, that was dad. So already she had this kind of entrepreneurial spirit. She was just like, I'm just gonna figure this out. I don't care. I'm gonna get it done. And she was. Finally told her sister about it. The sister told the mom. The mom was like, oh, my God. Okay, well, we'll deal with this. She has four siblings. Her dad died when she was nine, so it was like she was nine. And her oldest was, I think like 16 when her dad, when the dad died. And so it was a single mom raising these five kids. So she didn't have the energy to deal with that, so she sent her to her aunt and uncle in Connecticut. That's how I ended up in Connecticut. And you know, my birth mom was just saying they were so welcoming. And I went to high school there as a freshman and they welcomed me even though I was like six months pregnant. And they gave me a senior as a mentor. And I was taking all these prenatal vitamins. It was just this story of being protected and taken care of. And she said, I didn't want to give you up, but I knew that I was 13, I couldn't take care of you. And you were born and I held you for two days and I didn't want to leave you. And I wrote you this letter. Did you get the letter I wrote to you? I was like, oh my God. Like, it was just so overwhelming to hear her side of this story that I had told myself for, you know, 42 years is very, very different story.
- [151:24]
Rich Roll
Yeah. The story that you've been telling your whole life, like, you know, is revealed to be a complete, you know, fabrication of the truth. Right. And yet it has informed you, like, fundamentally as a human being for that period of time. Time, yeah. And to have the opportunity to retell a new story is a gift. But I think the whole thing speaks to just how powerful these stories are and how, how much we allow them to really commandeer, you know, how we show up in the world and our worldview and how we behave and interact with other people and our fears. Everything is a function of story.
- [152:02]
Craig Maude
Yep. And as we sat there and she told me about her, like, she's like, I was always a hard worker. I was working a part time job at 13. That's why I met the guy who got me pregnant. And I was working at a deli. And she's like, by the time I was 16, I bought my first car, 18, bought my second car, bought my first house at 22.
- [152:18]
Rich Roll
She's like a baller. She's got like the entrepreneur thing, she's got the writer thing. And you're seeing clearly and you want.
- [152:25]
Craig Maude
To know what her job is?
- [152:27]
Rich Roll
I don't know computer programming.
- [152:29]
Craig Maude
That's what. Did you know that? No, I did. She's a computer programmer, so she. And she's completely self taught. She didn't graduate from college. She's completely hacked together this life. I'm just gonna make it work. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna do this thing, you know? She's been to Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, on, like, client work.
- [152:44]
Rich Roll
Oh, really? Yeah.
- [152:45]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Wow.
- [152:46]
Rich Roll
Is she into, like, Nintendo Switch?
- [152:48]
Craig Maude
And, like, I think her family is. I think her husband's like, a big gamer or something. But, like. But it was like hearing her say these things again. It's this rewiring. And here was the most kind of surrealist sci fi moment. As I'm sitting there and she's telling me these things, I realized for the first time in my life, I understood where my brain came from. I'm like, oh, I just have your brain in my head. Everything you're saying, the way you've dealt with everything, is exactly how I've dealt with everything in my life. I have just been using your blueprint, your genetic brain blueprint to move through this world. Because no one in my family understood what I was doing. No one in my town could empathize with the decisions I was making. And yet here you are, sitting in front of me. And that nature element of this, I am just, you know. And the waitress didn't come over to us for two and a half hours. We didn't order anything.
- [153:39]
Rich Roll
And the weird thing is, like, you're old enough such that she's kind of your age. Like, she's like a peer, you know what I mean? She's younger than I am, so they.
- [153:48]
Craig Maude
Thought we were on a really weird Tinder date. You know, it's like. It was just like, what is happening in this booth here? You know, these. It's the most profound, you know. Yeah, weird, weird online dating situation. But, yeah, it was so strange. And, you know, she's like, do you have friends in Chicago? I'm like, yeah, I've got some friends. I got a dinner tonight. And she was like, you have dinner tonight? I was like, yeah. I mean, I thought we were just doing lunch. And she goes, I got us tickets to the symphony and a pizza reservation and we're doing an art architecture tour. And I was just like, oh, my God. Like, of course I'll cancel. Like, you know, you've got me. Like, I'm here, I'm here. And we did this walk through the city. And she was like. She's like, I'm so glad you can walk because I wanted to do this big walk through Chicago and show you everything. And she's like, I was hoping you weren't gonna be, like, morbidly obese. I was like, what if he shows up in a wheelchair? What are we gonna do? You know? She had, like, all these weird paranoias about it. And we ended up walking for, like, three or four hours that afternoon. And it would start raining, and we'd have to duck into a place and, you know, and then we'd start walking again. And it was. It felt like all of the walking I had done and all of the work I had done on myself was in service of doing that walk.
- [154:52]
Rich Roll
Well, this is the conclusion of the biopic. You and your mom, you know, walking down. Walking down, you know, the boulevard of Chicago with the sun setting over Lake Michigan and the credits rolling.
- [155:04]
Craig Maude
Right, right. Yeah.
- [155:07]
Rich Roll
That's an amazing story. And the fact that it culminated in, like. Like a walk. And it sounds as if the walk was her suggestion.
- [155:15]
Craig Maude
It was. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, I want to walk Chicago. Let's go walk Chicago. I was like, hey, you're speaking my language. That's wild, man. Yeah.
- [155:22]
Rich Roll
Where does that leave dad?
- [155:24]
Craig Maude
Dad. Dad is complicated. So dad, if you search his name, he has two results on Google. One is filing the two court records. One is filing to stop paying child support payments, and then the other is filing for bankruptcy. So he can.
- [155:40]
Rich Roll
He can wait a minute, maybe. Maybe later.
- [155:43]
Craig Maude
Also turns out dad has struggled with alcohol. So it's, like, not a big surprise. But the biggest for me, kind of lovely, delightful surprise, is that I have a sister, a half sister. She's 28. This is also the weird thing, is how young, kind of everyone is. 28, married. She didn't want to connect at first. She's from the dad's side side, and she's an only child. And her and her father also haven't spoken for, like, 10 years. So there's all this kind of estrangement, weird, you know, in kind of through line through both of our lives. And immediately I was just like, I have a younger sister. And this is like, something I'd never thought about before, but I was just, like, filled with this almost like, preternatural desire to just be like, I've got you, sis. Like, let me protect you. Like, immediately. Just so bizarre. And we kind of reached out to her. She didn't want to connect. And then a couple months ago, she sort of reconsidered and we connected and we did a video call, and it was just immediately like, oh, my God, you're a great person. You're a great person. I want to have you in my life. And after the video call, she's like, hey, bro. And she's like, can I call you, bro? Texting. And we've suddenly, I think, both realize how incredible it is to, as an adult, suddenly have this new sibling and both of us be relatively grounded, not need the other. You know, it's not this weird, like, needy situation. And I thank God she didn't meet me in my 20s, you know? Cause I would have. You know, I would have been a very different person for her to meet. And now we both get to kind of revel in and try to figure out, what does this mean? How does this relationship work going forward? You know, I'm going on this book tour in America now, and I'm gonna be in Seattle, and she's gonna fly down and meet me, and that's where we're going to meet for the first time. But it is so cool to have this sister, you know? And we text with each other, you know, a couple times a week. And she asked me for advice. Hey, I'm changing jobs. What do you think? You know, I heard you on this podcast. That was cool. You know, it's been a real shock to go from having no family, essentially because my adoptive family is so small, to here's my mom, and she has four brothers and sisters. They have a bunch of kids. I'm getting messages on Instagram from, like, random people in Wisconsin that's like, hey, I'm your. I'm your cousin. I run a flower shop. I'm 33.
- [158:04]
Rich Roll
Oh. Because they know that. Yeah. Yeah.
- [158:06]
Craig Maude
It's spread.
- [158:07]
Rich Roll
So that's. That's wild.
- [158:08]
Craig Maude
It spread. It's because, you know, after that meeting with my mom, she clearly went home and was like, my son is Craig, and he's awesome. I love him. Oh, my God, check out all this cool stuff. Stuff he's doing. And so, like, it's just the whole family suddenly has me on their radar.
- [158:21]
Rich Roll
This is a fairy book ending, right? I mean, it's lucky for you. It's always been a journey to find home.
- [158:29]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [158:29]
Rich Roll
And you had to go all the way around the world and go on all these long walks, you know, all for it to culminate in Chicago.
- [158:37]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I know. Which is an awesome walk.
- [158:39]
Rich Roll
But there's a cool thread line in there, which is this. This search for a sense of belonging within yourself and how you fit into the world and who these people are and adopting people and creating your own family along the way. And then as a consequence of doing that, growing into yourself so that you could be Someone who is appropriate and available for the family that gave birth to you. Like, there's a cool full circle idea to this whole thing.
- [159:14]
Craig Maude
It is cool. And now Thanksgiving is like this potentially very big event. It's like, oh my God, might be 40 people at Thanksgiving dinner or it.
- [159:23]
Rich Roll
Could go crazy in haywire.
- [159:24]
Craig Maude
Yeah, it could be like now, right?
- [159:26]
Rich Roll
In reflecting on your book, like there is. I'm curious about this. Like there's a veneer of sadness in it, you know, like there's. You can feel the grief without pointing a finger directly towards it. It's sort of layered with a heaviness. But I think at the same time there's a deeply hopeful aspect to your message, you know, which is when you slow down and you really allow yourself to feel and be present with those emotions and with your environment and with the people that you encounter, you are able to see the beauty in the world. And there's something optimistic about that. And it feels like an urgent message for the moment.
- [160:15]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Well, I appreciate your generous reading on that. But yeah, there is a way in the countryside to focus on the negative. This depopulation and what's going to happen. And almost like a natural disaster, like there isn't a way to reverse this at this point point. And trying to unpack why what's left still feels powerful. In the last moments of this thing existing, of course there's gonna be a sadness to that because it's disappearing, but also in the very Japanese way, that ephemerality of things, very Buddhist.
- [160:51]
Rich Roll
I don't know a lot about Shintoism, like what is the Shinto spin on that?
- [160:56]
Craig Maude
I mean, same, but just this Shinto is fundamentally just this kind of animation, animist respect of nature. And the shrines are often built around, began as just natural objects. So a beautiful tree, an incredible rock, and then around that the shrine grows. The most important shrines are those sorts of things, shippet.
- [161:16]
Rich Roll
Isn't that the idea? Do you know that idea?
- [161:20]
Craig Maude
I don't know.
- [161:21]
Rich Roll
Basically the beauty and the imperfection which applies, if I understand the word correctly, to. To when nature reclaims, you know, buildings in decay or, you know, the landscape that has fallen into disrepair.
- [161:36]
Craig Maude
I like that. Yeah, you start to see a lot of that. Yeah. But yeah, Shinto kind of leans into that because the shrine sort of exists in deep conversation with nature and then a lot of times there's rebuilding built into it. So like the issei Shrine every 20 years gets rebuilt next to each, next to itself and you kind of see the 20 year old shrine and the brand new shrine next to each other, and they use hinoki cypress to build them. And after 20 years, you just see how nature is already reclaiming it. And then you see the brand new fresh. It almost looks like it's lit from within. It's glowing. It's beautiful. You understand why they use it because Shinto is about purity and kind of birth. And Buddhism is sort of where you have funerals. That's where, like, you know, you go do a funeral at a Buddhist temple. But Shinto is all about birth and life and things like that. And to see them side by side is actually quite profound. And every 20 years, you kind of get that ceremony. And it's a way of marking time. So there's a lot of time marking in Shinto as well. It's really beautiful.
- [162:36]
Rich Roll
Final thing before we end this. How can we all pull a page out of the book, Book of John, you know, like. Like practicing this in our own lives? How do you translate his language into something that we can do?
- [162:53]
Craig Maude
Yeah, I mean, the reason, I guess sort of got addicted to these walks or this way of working creatively is because for me, having that framework made it impossible not to do the work. And as we've talked about mood and action following each other. And so it started in my 20s, trying to break with the alcohol, with the running. And it's like, okay, creating a little framework of running to break that habit or whatever. And then wanting to do more writing and wanting to do more looking deliberately and so building, accidentally falling into understanding that these walks, these long walks could allow me to do that. So I would say starting to look at what simple structures you could build, start to build up from very small. It could be very complex, as I'm doing with the walks, to enable the thing you to do, the thing you want to do. And I said the one thing that everyone can do that most everyone is doing now the wrong way, is take your phone out of your bedroom. Like that, for me, is kind of the reason why I knew to disconnect on the walks was because about 15 years ago, right after the iPhones kind of got released, I started going offline at 10pm and I wouldn't allow myself back online until noon or 1pm the next day, because half having that morning, that completely offline morning, that was when the best writing I was doing happened. That was when the most generative creative work happened. And I could feel almost like dopamine little guppies sort of reaching for the fish food of dopamine in my Brain, forgive me news, give me social media. And that freaked me out. And so creating this rigid framework where you go offline at night and then you don't come back online to lunch, if you can do that. Not a lot of people can do that, but you can probably do it on the weekend. And you can certainly put your phone in a place that you won't see until lunch. And I think that is also critical. It's like don't just put your phone in the living room on the table, put it in a box in the corner of your garage or something where you have to deliberately go to that place to grab it the next day and try, just do that for a week. Try doing that for a week where your bedroom is a phone free place and your mornings are phone free. And I guarantee you there's going to be some kind of like richness of creative act that just naturally bubbles up. And I've taken that, I've been doing that for many, many years and I just took that and said, okay, what if we apply it to the whole walk and it turns out it works? It's really powerful.
- [165:11]
Rich Roll
That's great advice. Super cool. Have you ever done one of these walks in the United States from Philadelphia to Boston? I think the experience might be a little bit different.
- [165:24]
Craig Maude
We have it. I mean Kevin and I are like, let's do a walk in America. But there's no infrastructure for it. Like there's no, that's the problem.
- [165:29]
Rich Roll
You're just going to be on some thoroughfare, you know, where there's just seven elevens and gas stations or nothing.
- [165:36]
Craig Maude
Even here. Like I'm staying 1.4km from here and I looked at Google Maps and Google Maps, the route to walk it was like an hour and 20 minutes because it's like there's like an 11 lane highway, you know, it's like America is.
- [165:49]
Rich Roll
So, so it's not oriented around, it's not conducive to the kind of experience you can do it, but it's not.
- [165:54]
Craig Maude
Yeah, it's not pleasure in the direction.
- [165:56]
Rich Roll
Of the kind of experience you're trying to have.
- [165:57]
Craig Maude
And people kind of look at you like a crazy person.
- [165:59]
Rich Roll
I mean you can do the Appalachian Trail, but you're just not going to run into, you're not going to have those experiences.
- [166:03]
Craig Maude
Well, and there isn't. You're camping the whole way. So like Europe is great. I mean Spain, the Camino is like the most perfect logistic infused walk. And you can do it as cheaply. You can do it 10 bucks a day if you want the Camino. Or you can spend a couple hundred bucks a day and stay in really nice places. But, like, it's there, the infrastructure's there. You can camp if you want to.
- [166:22]
Rich Roll
It's hardly off the beaten path at this point. It's like a destination. It's like a tourist destination thing to do and check the box.
- [166:30]
Craig Maude
Well, I thought that way, too. Have you ever walked?
- [166:33]
Rich Roll
No, but it keeps coming up, and I know a lot of people who've done it. So at this point now, I feel I have resisted steps.
- [166:39]
Craig Maude
That's exactly how I felt. That's exactly how I felt. And Kevin and I did it. In 2018, we did the last hundred K of the Portuguese Camino. So there's like, there's English Camino, French Camino, Portuguese. When everyone talks about the Camino, it's usually the French. So it's over the Pyrenees into Spain, across to Santiago, and we did the Portuguese. Last hundred K of the Portuguese, no one was on that. And then before I did that with Kevin, I said, well, if I'm going all the way out there, let me walk the first 150k of the Camino from. From France. And I was like, this is going to be terrible. I'm like, this is going to be Disneyland. I was so negative on it, and I started it, and we, you know, I did it with a friend and we did eight days, and I was so heartbroken to leave. It is magical, Even with the people, even the fact that it's a destination. You can't deny the fact that what you're doing is hard. Doing a walk, this 600k walk, where you're taking five weeks or whatever to do it, that is demonstrably a difficult thing to do. Even if it is a touristy thing. Everyone is fully in on it. And it's so, so surreal to be with a bunch of other people that are doing the same hard thing that you're doing. And it's kind of cool. And you move at different paces and you meet all different people. I would so highly recommend if someone is looking to do a long walk and kind of wants to do. What if I disconnect? What if I go offline? What if I don't look at the news or whatever? Go do the Camino alone. It's built for solo walkers because you're going to naturally meet as many or as few people as you want, and it is a profoundly magical thing. And getting to Santiago, even though millions of people are doing this walk, getting to Santiago still feels like, holy crap, this is. Yeah, this is special.
- [168:11]
Rich Roll
The Camino feels like the new psychedelics. It's the peyote, like psychedelics for a period. It was just coming up constantly on the podcast, but now, like, the Camino is taking its place. So there's something for, you know, here for me to look at. And I should say, like a week from today, I'm getting back surgery.
- [168:27]
Craig Maude
Okay.
- [168:27]
Rich Roll
Like a very serious back surgery. And I have a, you know, I'm going to have a very long road to recovery, but there's going to be, you know, a good many, many, many, many, many months when all, like, all I'm going to be able to do is walk.
- [168:39]
Craig Maude
Okay.
- [168:40]
Rich Roll
And it'll stay that way. I don't know. So, like, walking is like, you know, this is what's showing up for me.
- [168:47]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there are, you know, Europe is replete with amazing trails and England, you know, the right of way. You can kind of make up trails everywhere. It's pretty special. And it's. America just doesn't have the history to have that.
- [169:02]
Rich Roll
What's the big walk on your wish list? Walk, wish list, any walk in the world.
- [169:07]
Craig Maude
I want to do more walks in Ireland. I've only been to Belfast. I just like Irish people and I just feel like I like meeting more Irish people. So that's a big one.
- [169:18]
Rich Roll
They're the nicest, kindest, most generous, welcoming people you're ever going to meet.
- [169:22]
Craig Maude
Amazing. And I'd love to do more in Italy. The Dolomites. Walking the Dolomites, I think would be incredible. So there's a few of those. And then I would like to do the full Camino because I've only walked the first, like 150k and the last 100k. So I'd like to do the pump out the whole thing at some point.
- [169:38]
Rich Roll
In Italy, I know there's a trail system that goes all the way from Sicily all the way to the north. That's basically historically been the routes that the vitners, like the Grand Grape, the, the grape farmers would take to transport their product or whatever. And they've just been there for like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. So there's like an ultra race that you like a multi, you know, week, whatever, ultra race. But I'm sure, like, that would be an epic walk because you're, you're not like on the road, but you're going through these villages and townships and stuff the whole way.
- [170:10]
Craig Maude
Yeah. Anyway, sounds like a good one.
- [170:13]
Rich Roll
It's just great. Dude, this felt like an old school podcast. Like just like really, really, like nervous, like soul nourishing. Yeah. Like really lovely to meet you and I think that your work is beautiful and artistic and such a meaningful expression that's much needed right now. And I, I appreciate you coming here today and sharing with me.
- [170:35]
Craig Maude
Well, thank you.
- [170:35]
Rich Roll
Yeah.
- [170:36]
Craig Maude
Thanks buddy.
- [170:37]
Rich Roll
Good luck with the book.
- [170:38]
Craig Maude
Thanks.
- [170:38]
Rich Roll
Things indeed do become other things.
- [170:40]
Craig Maude
They do. I know.
- [170:42]
Rich Roll
And they will continue to do so.
- [170:44]
Craig Maude
Yeah.
- [170:45]
Rich Roll
Cheers man. Thanks.
- [170:46]
Craig Maude
Thank you.
- [170:55]
Rich Roll
That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page@richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast on Archive My books, Finding Ultra Voicing Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal planner@meal planner.richroll.com if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors and finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any any page@richroll.com Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our Creative Director, Dan Drake, content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Prior and of course our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathew. This Appreciate the love love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants Namaste.