Five Pieces Of Media To Get To Know Me Better
On Friday night I had a few beers with my friends Blair and Brady and we spent the entire time talking about Star Wars, Warhammer, Star Trek, Dune, and Lord of the Rings and Magic: The Gathering. We also spoke very briefly about our families, and literally nothing about our jobs or modern politics.
It was a ton of fun.
At the end of the night, I asked a question to the group: What are the pieces of media we’d have to watch to get to know you better? We all came to the table with different favourite universes, and they influenced what we’d recommend or our views on other things.
None of us had the answers right at hand - it’s a different question than “what are your current favourite movies or books?” and requires some thought. We all promised to get back to each other with our list.
Here’s mine:
The Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson This was one of the first serious pieces of science-fiction that I read, and as soon as I finished Blue Mars, the third book in the trilogy, I went right back to Red Mars and read the entire thing back-to-back. Since then I’ve probably read the entire series at least ten times. And every time I still cry when I get to the last page.
What I love about the series is that against the background of sci-fi, climate change, and big action set-pieces it’s a story of human relationships and how they drive and shape the future.
At a young age, I started to appreciate how different points of view might be trying to achieve the same thing, but with radically different paths and outputs. Frank, John, Maya, Sax - they all want almost the same thing. Who they are as people, and their interactions with other, influence how they try and get there, with wildly different results and outcomes for everyone.
It also helped me put relationships, friendships, and work in perspective: things happen, and pass, and life goes on. Some people will always be in your life, some will drift in and out of your life.
It’s also a book series about optimism, and I go back to it time and time again when I think about what is happening in the world today and if things can or will ever get better.
See also Aurora by Kim Stanely Robinson, and anything in the Hainish series by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Mars Trilogy was my ticket into a a more human world of sci-fi.
For more Sci-fi recos from me check out this list.
Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink When I originally asked the question and with the original framing for this article I was thinking more on the positive side of things.
A little over a decade ago I was a heavy participant in the then-nascent “Manosphere.” I listened to (and worse, respected) Joe Rogan. I watched a lot of UFC. I had an Onnit sticker on my bike. I flaunted how much I liked lifting weights.
During that time I started to hear about this Jocko Willink guy, an ex-Navy SEAL turned podcaster and executive leadership coach. He of the performative 4am workouts, and of taking personal responsibility for your actions as a leader.
I read Extreme Ownership when I was going through a spectacularly difficult period, both personally conflicting and professionally fraught: My client was Volkswagen, and it was during the time when they lied about their emissions. At the same time, I was in a long-term relationship that was crumbling and near its end.
My takeaway from Extreme Ownership was that in order to be successful in a mission (or job or life, or etc) you need to have total control over everything that happens, and to make sure that everyone involved knows what to do and when.
At that time, it felt like everything going wrong was my fault. It felt like if only I’d had more ownership over everything I would have succeeded. From that, I’ve tried to be tightly organized. I’ve tried to pay attention to detail. I’ve focused on personal exercise as a form of demonstrating that discipline, and of rising early. I’ve always sought perfection, no matter what the cost.
That’s a hard lesson to unlearn. And harder still to unlearn when you’re not totally convinced it’s a bad lesson.
Spartan (2006 dir. David Mamet) - I’m pretty sure every dude has one action or comedy movie that they hold up as their favourite, can quote every line, and will tell you (especially after two or three beers) why that film is so criminally underrated.If they think of themselves as any sort of cinemaphile, wonk, strategist, or deep thinker they probably lean even harder into their love of this movie. In some ways, it might be their way for balancing out more serious interests, and acknowledging that they can still be fun. A lot of times that movie is Die Hard, Heat, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, or the Goonies. Sometimes it’ a Christmas movie. It’s never Blade Runner or the Alien(s) movies: these are too layered to be considered for this.
For me that movie is Spartan, a critically mid and criminally under-watched thriller starring Val Kilmer and directed by David Mamet.
As with Extreme Ownership, it pushes a sort of self-reliance that I continue to find attractive: even fifteen years after I first saw the movie I liked the opening line enough that I got it tattooed on my arm:
“You had your whole life to prepare for this moment,” says Val Kilmer’s character. “Why aren’t you ready?”
But it was more than just that that I liked. It had tough, clipped dialogue that I was drawn to. It had a story that lived in the shadows, and didn’t feel the need to overexplain itself. Action without lead-up and calm decisions under fire. A solitary man acting as an extension of, but not entirely supported by a team. There was a lot to admire there.
The movie is also extremely quotable, which probably reinforces why I like it.
Watch the trailer for Spartan here.
I’d add Mamet’s “Memo To The Writers Of The Unit” to the list of supplementary reading to get to know me better.
Ghost In The Shell (1995) - I was probably 14 or 15 when I bought Ghost In The Shell. I didn’t really know what anime was. I didn’t know much about cyberpunk. I had no idea what I was getting into.
And I was absolutely blown away. Not just by the movie itself, but by the trailers before the movie: Ninja Scroll, Akira, Patlabor. This was a world that I’d seen through an 8-bit haze in the form of video games or in comics, but here it was brought to full, violent colourful motion.
At the time, the internet was barely a thing. Most of what was there was text-based, and any images were either so low-resolution as to be useless or took so long to download you could eat lunch while it was happening. Exposure to new types of media didn’t just happen easily.
GitS was a gateway into a whole new world of thinking about computers about what could possibly be, and also what the world of computers could be.
In some very direct way, I’m pretty sure it also inspired my initial interest in Japan, and led to me learning Japanese and moving there in my early twenties: I longed for the neon-lit rainy streets I knew from the movie.
It also shaped my academic career: I wrote at least three long-form essays exploring the world of Motoko Kusanagi, Section 9, and what it meant to be truly human. This was some of my first exposure to doing more in-depth analysis of the movies and the media around us to look at themes and meaning, and likely drove me into my career as a strategist.
Watch the Ghost In The Shell trailer
Steamed Hams - The Simpsons If we’ve spent anytime together over the last decade you know that I’ve got a particular love of referencing the Simpsons, and in particular the earlier seasons. In this, I’m not unlike millions of other men of a certain age (and yes, they’re almost always men).
What I didn’t always appreciate was just how good the writing in The Simpsons is. And I’d argue that Steamed Hams is one of the best and most tightly written, acted, and animated scenes ever. But that alone isn’t why it makes my list.
The Steamed Hams Meme Explosion (What an awful phrase - I’ll know I’ll regret typing that in reference to “media to get to know me better”) of 2018 made me dive in deeper, and helped me understand that obscure references could also be art and even more hilarious than the original. It made me research the writers and the references to find out what made those early seasons such magic.
It made me appreciate odd turns of language, and bizarre comedy. And again, how important good, structured writing is.
How people answer this question differs greatly on how it’s framed, and the context of the friends discussing it.
Since this was born out of a conversation I had with a group of friends who I regularly play complex boardgames, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering with, it was slanted towards our nerdier, genre interests.
When I asked my wife what five pieces of media I should know to get to know her better, and told her mine, she took it differently. She asked me what values I learned from those pieces of media. She asked how they changed me as a person. Her list was much more personal. It was less a list of favourites, and more a list of emotionally resonant moments driven with certain books, films, songs, or letters as a core part of that memory.
In discussion with our friends, it was more around which things we were fans of. It acted as a reference point for suggestions, and to understand the other’s viewpoints of our own interests.
Neither approach was wrong, and I’ve tried to incorporate thinking from both in the above.