The Monday Media Diet with Richard Bailey

On the Brando, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers by Michele Gelfand, and Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux

When he's not diving, Richard Bailey (RB) is an innkeeper in Tahiti. His company has eight properties including the legendary Brando. He is also an Ocean Elder, and founder of NGO Tetiaroa Society which operates the science and conservation field station on Tetiaroa atoll.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a Boomer. Born in the 50s. Back then if you worked summer jobs you could afford college. I was fortunate to receive a patrician education. Stanford University and Harvard Business School. I thought I was tracing a career in finance. Worked at Citibank. Then went with my Dad to Tahiti. He had always dreamed of the islands. There I met a girl, and never really looked back. If you can find a place to call home, someone to join you on life’s journey, and something you enjoy doing, that’s the trifecta of happiness, right? I fell into the hospitality business. I love imagining experiences for guests.

Today my company owns 8 resort properties in the islands of French Polynesia, I’m still married, have 3 amazing kids and 7 astonishing grandkids. And I still have to pinch myself when I drive down from our home to work and see the blues and greens and all the colors in between of the ocean and lagoons of the islands. My Dad’s dream became my own, only I get to live it. I’m so lucky.

One of our properties is The Brando, on Tetiaroa. The atoll is bewitchingly beautiful. It will literally take your breath away. I worked with Marlon for 5 years figuring out what should be done there, and then another 10 making it happen. I’m very proud of the result. But you have to see it to understand. Like Marlon himself said, it defies description with words.

Describe your media diet.

For breakfast I need to check Google alerts to see if any of our resort properties have turned up in news or travel articles, and what is being said about them. Then I’ll have a look Hotel Investment Today and Virtuoso Life. More than specific news items, I’m looking for trends.

For lunch I have some Bloomberg and once a week Barron’s, following market and macro events. I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to avoid politics. But I confess to a bit of CNN from time to time. Weekends I like print versions of The New Yorker and Atlantic.

Evenings are for family so not much media. I am not on social media, at all. So no news from there. I just can’t embrace the idea of another 30 minutes or an hour a day on a small screen. And I don’t do podcasts. I probably should, but at 71, old dogs etc…

What’s the last great book you read?

Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux. But I tend to read books in parallel rather than in series. I read Burma Sahib along with Maurice Bligh’s Bligh In the Wake of the Bounty. Reading in parallel can unlock deeper insights into the subject of each work. George Orwell and William Bligh, for example. The one decoding tyranny and the other wrongly accused of it. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

What are you reading now?

Right now? I am reading Rule Makers, Rule Breakers by Michele Gelfand, but in parallel the Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. Trying to figure out if stoicism would do better in a “tight” or a “loose” society. I like the Stoic value system. It has taught me a lot about the nature and origin of human virtue and helped me understand this crazy world a bit better. Justice, wisdom, courage, forbearance, humility – and its close cousin humor. Stuff we don’t see much in our politics, or even in business for that matter.

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

I’ll go straight to the table of contents and choose the most compelling article. Then maybe one more. Is it my time-constrained life? I rarely read a magazine cover to cover, even my favorite ones.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Seneca, Epictetus

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

World Geography.

Plane or train?

Plane, always. (I flew a small one around the world. It’s not the places, it’s the people. No matter the color or the language, we all want the same things.)

What is one place everyone should visit?

Anywhere under the water.

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

Chaos theory, fractal structures. Oh my gosh. The butterfly effect? How small changes in initial conditions can result in widely divergent final results. Back in the early 90s I got so deep into this stuff it almost consumed me. I was buying computers and writing programs in Basic to create fractal structures with non-linear recurrent equations that would take a week to emerge on my screen. But I’m not a mathematician so it was a frustrating experience. I learned how literally beautiful math can be. And it turns out there is order in the randomness. We all know this now in areas like climate modeling and laminar flow. Eventually I came to and went back to more productive endeavors…

Another thing I’m thinking about:

Seventy percent of all ocean biomass exists in a layer between 200 and 1000 meters deep known as the mesopelagic or “twilight” zone, where there’s no light. Life there has evolved without photosynthesis. Why is this interesting? Because we virtually know nothing about it. We know more about the moon than the twilight zone. And yet it is essential to humanity for mineral and carbon recycling, climate regulation, and marine ecological health. I would say a lot more, if I could. How at home we separate our food pantry from the garbage bins, but here on earth we mix it all together in the ocean. How the twilight zone is threatened by deep sea mining and mesopelagic fishing to feed fish farms we have to have because we have already eaten more than 50% of the surface fish since 1970.