STRATEGYAARON 2.0
A lot is going on in the world right now. Strategyaaron is my attempt at making sense of it all.
To build a media brand
A lot is going on in the world right now and there are thousands of blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and YouTube channels doing their best to make sense of it all. Strategyaaron is my attempt.
Strategy is achieving your ambitions as stuff outside your control tries to stop you. I’m a longtime student and sometime practitioner. Last August, after a couple of stressful years helping run a startup, missing my “first loves” of politics and foreign affairs, I decided to start a podcast. Like 99% Invisible does with design, I’d use strategy as the prism through which to look at world events.
It’s been a dizzying fifteen months. Guests include Labour MP Jeevun Sandher, historians Anna Reid and Andrew Lambert and Kathleen Burk, true crime author Mike Finkel, economists Duncan Weldon and Cristina Caffarra, and Edward Luce of the Financial Times. I’ve talked about China with Kerry Brown, Ukraine with reporters Jen Stout and Christopher Miller, behavioural science with Nick Chater and Erez Yoeli, the Capetians of France with Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Homer’s Odyssey with Adam Nicolson, and the decline of the West with Samir Puri. The show has also led to me meeting exciting new thinkers like Paul Klein, Katja Bego, Gesine Weber, John Oxley, and William Lane. I’ve even discussed Father Christmas with an American general! And there are still more great guests to come.
Despite all this, I feel dissatisfied. It’s hard work building a media brand from scratch. Reaching out to a potential guest, scheduling a time, doing research, buying their book if they have one and reading it, preparing questions, recording the interview, overcoming my shyness and talking to strangers, reassuring them that I’m not a crank, then editing the recording, producing it, then promoting it online. Sometimes an episode will take off. Other times, it’ll sink like a stone – especially on Bluesky, where it seems like audio and video aren’t taken as seriously as the written word. At least twice this year I’ve decided to just shelve the project, only to receive an email from someone I’d given up hope of hearing from saying they’d love to be a guest…
Yet I’m also dissatisfied because I worry I’m merely a conduit for other people’s ideas. My ambition is to be a latter-day Walter Lippmann. When I first came up with strategyaaron, I imagined I’d be writing too – which is why I launched it on Substack. As the podcast got underway, however, I just didn’t have time. The production process I describe above is repeated week in, week out. My only opportunity to share my own ideas is via questions to guests. It actually occurred to me working on this post that, whenever I’ve decided to stop the show, I’ve felt an unusually acute need to write – and then an episode has bombed on Bluesky. “Pivot to text!” I’d tell myself.
Of course, this would be disastrous for building a modern media brand. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to read things. They are swiping TikTok, downloading podcasts, and falling into YouTube clickholes. Even I – someone who loves books and finds it easier to process information when it’s in text form – read less than I used to. It would be wrong to conclude that this suggests a dumbing down, however. A YouTube channel that just features PowerPoint slides about Russia's war in Ukraine has a hundred thousand subscribers. Video journalist Johnny Harris has over seven million. A podcast like The Rest is History racks up c. 15m downloads a month. There is a real hunger for knowledge, as this great tweet captures:
If I really want to be a latter-day Walter Lippmann, I ought to carry on doing what I’m doing – but maybe be better at it.
And yet and yet and yet, there is that need to write…
I’ve thought hard about the future of strategyaaron over the last few weeks. How can I build on what I have achieved so far, as well as dispel my dissatisfaction?
These are some things I’ve concluded…
- Strategyaaron must be a multi media brand. Audio, video, and text.
- For both technical and ethical reasons, I have ditched Substack. I’ve transferred the podcast to Spotify, and I’ll publish text versions of my interviews on Ghost.
- I am adopting the maxim that a good four hundred words is better than an okay four thousand words. Rather than agonise over long articles, I will try to write something short once a week.
Today, there will be a great interview with journalist Joanna Lillis about her new book on Uzbekistan. Ahead of Christmas, I’ll be talking to politicians, historians, new thinkers – and a former President.
I hope you decide to join us:
