The Monday Media Diet with Jannes Soerensen

On presence, Kepler, and Kyoto

Jannes Soerensen (JS) is one of my favorite people. He’s a multi-hyphenate: amazing hotelier, writer, founder of Kepler, and just published Checking In - The Power of Presence and Attention to Transform Hospitality Delighted to have him with us this week. -CJN

Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Berlin, the son of a headmaster and a social worker. Luxury wasn’t part of my childhood — family luxury was time spent together. I entered hospitality at 20 as a page boy at the Hotel Adlon, not out of ambition but curiosity. Over the next two decades I worked my way through some of the world’s great hotels — the George V in Paris, The Plaza in New York, The Connaught, Le Bristol in Paris and then The Beaumont in London — and somewhere along the way I realised that what I loved wasn’t hotels per se, but what they can do to people. At their best, they return you to yourself. I left The Beaumont in 2021 to build Kepler — a hospitality company built around attention, care and meaning. We also published a book in March, Checking In, which Philippe Krenzer and I wrote together over five years. He passed away in October 2025, just before it came out. The book is both a manifesto and a tribute.

Describe your media diet.

I stopped reading the news daily about a year ago, after reading Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News. It was one of the better decisions I’ve made. I now read the FT on Saturday mornings — a physical copy, delivered to the house. One sitting, long-form. It’s enough. I’m more informed, less anxious, and I actually remember what I read. Beyond that, books are my primary source of thinking. I read broadly — philosophy, psychology, hospitality, economics — and I’m quite deliberate about it. Input shapes output.

What’s the last great book you read?

Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. His argument is essentially that talented, educated people are squandering their potential on safe, comfortable careers when the world needs them elsewhere. It’s uncomfortable in the best way. It confirmed something I’d been thinking about for a while — that building Kepler isn’t just a business project, it’s a responsibility. The hospitality industry has enormous untapped potential to do good: for guests, for communities, for the people who work in it. Most of it goes unrealised.

What are you reading now?

I’m moving between a few things. Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti — which is essentially an invitation to question everything you think you know about yourself and the world. Not easy reading, but genuinely clarifying. And I keep returning to Attensity! by The Friends of Attention, which makes the case that reclaiming our attention is one of the defining acts of our time. Both connect directly to what we argue in Checking In — that presence is the rarest luxury, and hotels are uniquely placed to protect it.

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

Saturday mornings, no phone nearby. I read the FT from front to back, but not every word — I follow what catches my attention rather than forcing myself through a checklist. Long-form pieces get full focus. Short news items I skim or skip. The ritual matters as much as the content: physical paper, unhurried, with coffee. It’s one of the few moments in the week that feels genuinely uninterrupted. I’ve noticed that the articles I read this way I actually retain. The ones I used to scroll through on a screen — almost nothing stuck.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Johann Hari, more seriously than he’s usually taken. Stolen Focus is often shelved as a self-help book, which undersells it. It’s a structural critique of how our attention has been systematically extracted — by platforms, by design, by economic incentives — and what that costs us as individuals and as a society. For anyone in hospitality it should be required reading. Our guests arrive distracted and fragmented. Understanding why — properly, not superficially — changes how you design spaces and experiences.

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

I’m going to resist the temptation to give a clever answer here. The honest truth is that the best thing I’ve done with my phone recently is remove most of the apps from it. The fewer the better. If I had to name one I find genuinely useful and underrated: my notes app. Everything goes in there — observations, half-formed ideas, things guests or colleagues say that catch my attention. It’s where most of Kepler’s thinking started.

Plane or train?

Train, without hesitation. You arrive in the centre of a city, not the outskirts. You can walk around, look out the window, think. There’s something about the pace of a train journey that matches the pace at which good ideas arrive. Some of the best conversations I’ve had have been on trains. Planes are a necessary compromise — trains are where I’d choose to be.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Kyoto — but only if you slow down enough to let it work on you. The ryokans there operate on a completely different logic to Western luxury hotels. Everything is understatement, precision, care. The Hiiragiya in particular. Room 52. There’s a 300-year-old cedar ceiling built by craftsmen who pruned the trees by hand for generations to avoid knots. Nobody told you that. You have to find it. That’s the point. It changed how I think about hospitality.

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

The attention crisis. It started with Dobelli — why daily news is bad for thinking — and I thought that was the end of it. Then I read Johann Hari on the structural theft of attention. Then Krishnamurti on the conditioned mind. Then Attensity! as a kind of manifesto for reclaiming it. I realised I’d been circling the same question for years without naming it: what does it mean to be truly present? And why is it becoming so rare? That rabbit hole eventually became Chapter 3 of Checking In. And it became one of the founding ideas of Kepler — that a hotel, done properly, is one of the last places where you can genuinely protect someone’s attention and give it back to them. (JS)