Meditation, Language, and LLMs

Roden Readers —

Hello! It’s me, Craig Mod. Author of TBOT (amzn | bkshp). Poking my head out into newsletter land. This? Roden, a newsletter you signed up for at some point. Perhaps last week, perhaps fourteen years ago, when I started shooting these out.

I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing something that I’m bad at and am trying to get better at: I’ve been having fun (and trying not to be crushed by the guilt of having fun). I went to LA and then Santa Fe and then Hokkaido with the binding agent of: eating great food with people I love. In Santa Fe I spent a few days meditating at Mountain Cloud Zen Center (more on that below; also, yes, fly from Japan to Santa Fe for Zen; also also, turns out the headquarters of their school is around the corner from my home ha ha ha). My body loves Santa Fe. Loves the crispness of the air. The elevation (once it gets used to it). The sharp light. The salsa. I spent a few mornings writing in Collected Works and generally came away from the whole visit thinking: I’d like to head back, eat More Salsa, spend more time in that corner of the US. In LA, I went deep on LLMs and Claws and all that with Kevin Rose (and also met some Hollywood-adjacent folks about book optioning), eating lots of Doordash’d Gwyneth Paltrow slop bowls and making software. I have to say, these three weeks of doofery have been some of the most fun weeks I’ve had in years. So, thanks for indulging me a bit of newsletter silence as I pretended to be a human out in the wild.