#807: In Case You Missed It: March 2025 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. That's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog/friday. That's tim.blog/friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog/friday.

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And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Optimal, minimal.

Craig Mod (1:44)

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Tim Ferriss (2:07)

Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com/podcast and find all the details there.

SPEAKER_4 (2:53)

Please enjoy. First up, Craig Mod, a writer, photographer, and walker living in Tokyo and Kamakura, Japan, and the author of Things Become Other Things and Kisa by Kisa. You can find Craig on Instagram and X at CraigMod. This excerpt comes from Tim's first interview with Craig.

Tim Ferriss (3:16)

2009 hike to Nepal. Is that enough of a cue? Can you tell this story?

Craig Mod (3:22)

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

And it turns out that I can drink a lot. I can have 15, 20 drinks, not throw up. I black out, sure. But like there's something in my genes that allows me to just drink. And then after two or three drinks, something activates where it's just all we live for is more drink. And I think, you know, from most of my twenties, because I had such a low sense of self-worth, because of where I came from, because I felt this abundance of people around me that I didn't feel I had. And I didn't know how to ratchet that up. And I had this desire to produce culture or to produce art, to produce literature at a level that I didn't know how to, and I didn't know how to bridge that gap. And what I ended up doing was, because I didn't have mentors, because I didn't have archetypes near me, I just drank like a fish. And I played a lot of music, because that was one thing I did have mastery over. And I played a lot of music, and I played a lot of that blacked out. And I'm really lucky I didn't die. I mean, it would be one of these things where many, many mornings of my life, I've woken up and it's just been checking, is my face okay? Did I break my skull open or something like that? And I was madly in love. I fell madly, madly in love. I was 26, 27 years old. And I had the most incredible love connection I had ever felt, this like otherworldly sense of being in love with this person. And we connected so intensely and immediately went on a 40 day trip. Like a week after meeting, a 40 day trip through Tibet. We went to Tibet. I was possessed by a spirit. I like, I spoke in tongues. Like this, we hiked up to a glacier.