421: ‘The Ratchet of Flippancy’, With Craig Mod

What are you drinking over there? I’ve got normal water, sparkling water, hot coffee, cold brew—the whole spread. Also, I cannot believe it’s been four years since you were last on. You’re mid–book tour prep, May sixth launch, right? Before we get there, where do you stand on AI lately?

Generative image and text stuff feels fraught—morally muddy training data, pirated books, all that. I avoid the image junk. Code generation, though, feels defensible thanks to open source. I moved from ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude, and Claude Code has been a revelation. I built a members-only Twitter-like space exactly how I wanted.

Discord, to me, feels like walking into a cheesy casino—too blinky, too synchronous. And you never feel like you’re in your community; you feel like you’re in Discord.

Exactly, so I built The Good Place: two posts per day, everything expires after a week unless a reply keeps a thread alive, all via RSS. It’s quiet, sane scale. I wrote it in Python with Flask and SQLite. LLMs helped, but you still have to know enough to steer or they’ll make garbage.

I’m Gen X archive-brained—I want everything forever. But the microfilm era scarcity made permanence feel like a moral good. Maybe that instinct has downsides?

Some things should last; most social feeds shouldn’t. Keep the truly historic moments, not the entire firehose. I back up like a maniac, but my real archive is books: distill the best, print it, and let a thousand copies live in the world.

On ephemerality and government: grown adults want to text, but the ratchet of flippancy for life-and-death policy on a chat app feels wrong.

Yes—the casual language around killing is the gut punch. Humans are fallible, so slowness and friction are features. Concentrated wealth and power only magnify our flaws.

Coding with AI blows me away and also messes with my identity. I grew up proud to program; now these systems outpace me. Part of me still thinks I should write every line.

Think photography: digital made certain skills optional but did not kill film. AI coding does not make everyone a dev; it supercharges people with a base. Claude Code in the terminal feels like pair programming—fast, fluid.

Humans do not think like computers. Python and Ruby read friendly but writing code is alien to most. For models, structure is easy; they are naturals. So why insist I hand-code everything?

I shipped something I never would’ve had time to build. I still review what it writes, but offloading boilerplate is worth a little muscle atrophy.

The magic trick is everywhere—LaunchBar, Kagi, tiny scripts—and AI gives me the one shell incantation I always forget so I can just move on.

Same with Alfred. I wired Google Drive search into it and a little “append to ‘you are not a piece of shit dot md’” workflow. Open models already handle this locally; translation is stellar. I hope no single winner dominates.

Meanwhile Siri cannot keep a kitchen timer straight. Apple flirting with open models raises black-box and training-data ethics. And the whole thing feels overthought.

Constrain Siri to a small, rock-solid domain—lights, timers, dates—and nail it. The current sprawl signals taste drift. Apple Music on macOS feels janky, like a thin veneer on shaky bedrock. Contrast that with thick, loving software like Things or Keynote.

iTunes slow-boiled into Apple Music and somehow got… brittle. Apple is still the only one making truly great computers, which makes their software complacency scarier.

I’ve even considered a Framework laptop with Linux—shape a system to my hand and feel the tradeoffs.

Let’s pivot. Your book—May sixth, Random House. How did this go from a walk and a pop-up newsletter to a hardcover?

Right after we last talked I walked approximately seven hundred kilometers through rural Japan, wrote and photographed daily via a pop-up newsletter, then spent four years shaping it. It is about hidden Japan and a long-ago friend, Brian—a letter to that friendship. It felt bigger than self-pub, so I knocked on doors until Random House said yes.

It reads like you—on-the-ground Japan filtered through Craig. Are the photos yours?

All mine except two licensed film stills. I redeveloped everything for black-and-white on mass-market paper. Random House got it—the pulpy offset vibe fits the story.

Where should people go to find it?

Search “Things Become Other Things,” or hit my website—the big link is up, tour details included.

How do you actually write, and when do you know it’s a book, not posts?

Time-boxed pop-up newsletters—no archive—force output and attention. I dictate notes while walking, then draft in Ulysses as Markdown, move chapters freely, stash dead darlings, and collaborate in Google Docs despite publishing’s Word habit. And getting a generous blurb from William Gibson—truly a dream.

I judge a book by the feel of ink and balance on the page—the old print trick is to flip it upside down and just look at the texture. Glenn’s letterpress book lays down heavy ink; yours runs Bembo lighter, and the photographs balance that visual weight. Two books from the same centuries-old type family, and it still feels timeless—likely will for centuries more. I wouldn’t have picked Bembo for you, but seeing it, it’s exactly right. Beautiful book, beautifully written. Thank you, Craig Mod, for coming on the show. Everybody, find where Craig is appearing and go see him in person. Please do.

Say hello. Give me a hug. I’m going to need hugs on this.