The Monday Media Diet with Alex Smith

On baby monitor UX, The Matter With Things, and 1984

Alex Smith (AS) is a writer and consults on business strategy. His company is Basic Arts and I like the newsletter he writes. We’re happy to have him on the page with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I try to help businesses get unstuck, make big moves, and escape the competition.

In practice this means I’m a strategy writer and consultant - but it’s important to note I mean “business strategy” in this case, not agency / planner type strategy.  I did a post today actually that enraged the advertising community because they seemed to think I was referring to the latter, not the former, so important to spell that out up front!

Ultimately then, this means quite simply deciding what the business in question is going to do.  What value it’s going to offer that people want, but can’t get elsewhere. That’s the game. If you want to know more you can check out my book, No Bullshit Strategy.

Outside of this I live with my family in Suffolk and London in the UK.

Describe your media diet. 

If we’re talking in terms of volume, in descending order it must be something like this:

- TV

- Podcasts

- Fiction books

- Non-fiction books

- YouTube

- Newsletters

- Twitter

- Miscellaneous stuff

I write on Linkedin, where I have a good following but never ever read anything on there.  Not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but there you go.

In terms of regular programs / content / creators I like, I would highlight:

- David Perrell, who is the “writing on the internet guy”, and is extremely good at gathering deep and thoughtful philosophical content from all sorts of places.

- Ted Gioa, “The Honest Broker”, who is just a great writer on various culture topics.

- Mark Goldbridge, just an Alan Partridge style ranter on all things Manchester United. (Probably watch more of him than anything else, so may as well admit it!)

What’s the last great book you read?

The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist.  Which is a real hospital pass of a recommendation, because it’s like 2000 pages long, so it’s not exactly a book that you “read”.  It’s about the nature of reality and how our brains delude us - largely being a very dense and scientifically rigorous destruction of materialism.

Not exactly light reading…. but that said, more light than you might imagine.

One good little anecdote from it: in France there’s this guy whose job is to pick which horse is going to win a race.  People then pay him for his picks.  The way he does this is to know NOTHING about the horses, the riders, or the race beforehand.  He simply strolls into the paddock where they’re warming up, and picks who he fancies, pretty much based on intuition and feel.  With this technique he consistently beats the bookmakers’ odds - and what’s even more fascinating is that the more information he has about the race beforehand, the worse his accuracy becomes.

Lots of this kinda stuff.

What are you reading now?

Weirdly, 1984.

And it’s staggering. Truly incredible piece of writing.  Which I suppose is an obvious thing to say, but it’s one those books we all were forced to read in school when we were idiots who wouldn’t appreciate it.  I certainly thought nothing of it then.

But now?

Wow.

It’s just a work of genius, with such deep insights.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

Publication? Like magazine or newspaper?

I suppose I don’t really read too much of them, but sometimes I read the newspapers

The only strategy to speak of is jumping to the bits I like and ignoring the rest.

Newspapers are hyper disposable media (rather that social media in that way I suppose), so I don’t feel the need to treat them with any reverence or respect.  I trust my brain to capture anything that’s worth capturing, and to drop the rest.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

The three authors who I’ve read who I felt should be “required reading” are Nassim Taleb and Iain McGilchrist (of The Matter With Things I mentioned above), and Wendell Berry (a sort of cultural critic).

It’s not like they’re necessarily the best things ever, but what I do think they each do, in their own way, is point out some serious structural flaws in the way we commonly think - which lead to a lot of really damaging real world outcomes.

So that’s why I would attribute the word “should” to them.

In a different vein, perhaps also people should read Truman Capote, to see what perfect writing really looks like - especially Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

Haha, baby monitor?

That’s a pretty sweetly designed app I must say.  I love ones that you pay for once, they do EXACTLY what you want, not an ounce more, and never ever bother you.

Plane or train?

Train…. although I have been craving a nice long haul flight since haven’t been on one in a while.

What is one place everyone should visit? 

I’m going to give one of those annoying answers to sound clever and not really address your question properly, BUT perhaps everyone should visit “reality”.

What I mean by this, is this:

Recently I went into the wilderness for 4 days with no shelter, no food, no people, no phone, no books, no nothing.  Just to sit in the woods and stare into space.  I wanted to see what this felt like - when you think about it this was pretty much how people lived for a lot of human history, and it’s almost impossible to put ourselves in that headspace now, given we’re so saturated in distraction and “stuff”.

Sufficed to say it was very very hard.

You obviously have withdrawals from all the self-soothing mechanisms you normally turn to throughout the day.  it’s just you, yourself, and the ticks. Lots of ticks alas.

Anyway, I’m sure the effect it has on each person is different and individual - but more generally I think that’s the closest you can come to experiencing reality in a direct, unmediated way.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Sorry to disappoint again, but this isn’t really something I do.

I’m not a “burrower”.  I don’t “zoom in” on anything.  In fact I am almost pathologically the opposite - I like to zoom out, get the gist, see the patterns, but never the detail.  This means I never get really “into” something.  Even my work, strategy, I’m not “into”.  I haven’t read much about it.  I’m not really even interested.  The reason I do it, ironically is because I believe the actual practice of strategy is that process of zooming out and seeing the bigger picture.  It’s an anti-detail, anti-rabbit hole discipline.  More something you feel than something you know about.

So yes, I really thought about it, but I couldn’t think of a single answer here.  And that is why. (AS)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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