Dear {{first_name | Friend}},

What a week!

I mean, I know I’m early to this entrepreneur lark, but it’s not too early to offer some advice to future founders: maybe avoid launching a business in the same week that several of your children (should you be blessed with any of the little devils) are starting at new nurseries and schools; especially if it also happens to be the week that you’re leaving Britain’s most influential news programme, with your final shift guaranteed to come after precisely zero sleep; and even more so straight after a summer holiday which was hijacked by line-by-line Budget analysis and contract hell. 

Yes, avoid that clash if you can. 

But launch the business we did. The ARC rocket has taken off. And a few days in, we appear to be happily in orbit, with you safe on board. How’s the view? Can you see Mars yet? (That’s enough. Ed*.)

You’re reading this letter because you’re in an exclusive, beautiful batch of people: one of the first subscribers to what I hope is the most exciting new club anywhere. Thank you so, so much for signing up. I’m not yet enough of an arriviste (give it time) to be anything other than monumentally humbled by the outpouring of niceness that followed my departure. This is not a humble-brag. I’m being honest. The affection in the comments on Instagram and TikTok means more to me than you might imagine. The same goes for the kindness in the comments on our nascent YouTube channel. We had some ambitious targets. We smashed through them. Thousands upon thousands of you have signed up: a lot more than we were expecting (Ok, that really is a humble-brag).

This first newsletter will be longer than most. I know how precious your time is. I want to just go a little further in revealing to you why The Amol Rajan Connection is happening. 

I haven’t said this bit before. The truth is, around this time last year, I was pretty low. Our youngest had just turned 2, the summer holidays were utterly knackering, the new school and nursery terms were beginning, and I had what was for some reason a particularly brutal run of shifts on Today. I have actually always tried not to whinge in public about the lack of sleep, because I was paid hugely well and the Producers - who sometimes do three nights on, three nights off - have it much, much worse. But I really did never crack the sleep thing with Today. Sleep used to be my super-power, but something happened before my first show that created grooves in my brain that I could never escape. After that first shift, the night before Today I would always start thinking, “What if I can’t sleep?”, and hours of insomnia would follow. I frequently did the show on no sleep at all, came home, struggled to kip and then went on the school run a total zombie. On one particular traipse up the hill for pick-up last year, I fell over. That was the day I texted Owenna Griffiths, our legendary Editor, and asked to significantly cut my shifts. She was typically wonderful about it. 

Anyway it all came to a head around about this time last year. At the school gates, a lovely grandad said hello to me, that he didn’t know I was a parent at the school, and that he loved University Challenge. I snapped back with something along the lines of, “Well if I keep going at this rate, they’ll find me dead on that set”. He looked at me aghast, shocked that the bloke off quizzy Mondays might in fact be a lunatic. He was polite enough to laugh it off, albeit awkwardly. I remember thinking straight away that I’d just said something really off-colour, and apologising to him. 

I have a daily ritual where, after drop off, I try to sit still for 10 minutes and not look at my phone. I think this is called mindfulness now, but I’ve long had a habit of just trying to stare at a tree or passing cloud, and the busier life has become, the more valuable this ritual has been. I went that day to a spot on the disused North London railway line I adore called Parkland Walk, with two elevated levels, like platforms. And I had something like a Howard Beale moment. 

You know what I mean, don’t you? It’s one of the greatest scenes in cinema history. 

In Network, Beale is a news anchor whose demons cannot be contained. In the end they come out, dance in front of his eyes, and finally claim him, with savage brutality. Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for this scene above all, with its immortal rage of the man who unleashes his inner torment: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”. That day on Parkland Walk, I was more sad than mad, but I definitely released some inner torment, and resolved that I’m not going to take this any more. I’m not pretending it was some quasi-religious awakening. I just remember thinking: Enough. This has to stop. I felt like there was a fork in the road: play it safe, sitting in that tepid bath of decline; or take a risk, have a punt, and shoot for the stars. 

Why was I sad? I’m not saying I was depressed, by the way. I don’t want to pathologise this; Depression is very serious, and I have not suffered from either that or crippling anxiety. What I was - am - going through are just the regular vicissitudes of life. It came down to three ailments of the soul: two acute, the other chronic. 

The chronic ailment was a feeling I have had for over a decade that, despite appearances, my career is a form of disaster tourism. I keep turning up at institutions and in industries about 20 years after they peaked. I arrived at The Independent in 2007. The paper was launched in October 1986. As a newspaper, those early years, beautifully recounted in Stephen Glover’s Paper Dreams, were unbeatable. I arrived at the BBC in late 2016. I would venture that 1996 was when the BBC was at the absolute zenith of its cultural power. My whole career has been surrounded by a spirit of doom and decline; of budgets being cut, and people being sacked (often by me). I’m 43 and - until now - I’ve never worked anywhere growing or profitable. I just think it would be eccentric, and sub-optimal, to spend my entire career in places that are getting smaller. And this too in a country that, for pretty much the whole of my adult life, has been stagnant or in decline. 

It’s on me, of course, having chosen the career path I have: media in the internet age. And I should at this point show just enough self-awareness to declare that I’ve had a really good time, done some great jobs, been well paid, and indeed loved my working life. In newspapers, I wanted to be an Editor, and there was one paper that I fell in love with as a student, owing in part to its leading the opposition to the Iraq War. So to be Editor of The Independent at 29 was a dream come true. At the BBC, I’ve had a wonderful run, trying my hand and voice and several of the biggest and best shows around; and in University Challenge I’m beyond blessed to present a show that I genuinely believe to be the best thing on British TV. And I will keep presenting it. 

I know how lucky I am. It’s just, I study history and great careers and Jazz Ages, and I’m weirdly nostalgic for golden eras I’ve missed. To read Tina Brown’s unputdownable diaries about New York journalism in the 1980s is to know that there was a heyday of print journalism, and it sure as hell isn’t now. 

Yet there is a heyday happening now, and in my industry. It’s called YouTube. And podcasts, and newsletters, and streaming giants. I want in on it. 

There is a difference, I guess, between how careers look from the outside and how they feel from the inside. A cursory glance at my Wikipedia page would suggest I’ve had some very cool gigs. And I really have. But they have always been situated in atmospheres of gloom. I have studied great careers in real detail, including by interviewing many national and global icons. One conclusion is that Malcolm Gladwell was right to argue, in Outliers, that opportunity matters as much as talent. The secret sauce of outstanding professional success is Timing: ensuring your personal trajectory and that of an industry intersect. 

I’ve wondered: what would it feel like to be where the action is? Where History is being made, and Legend forged? Where there is liquidity, and ambition, and growth? Growth is good, as Gordon Gekko nearly said. And I want to feel it. 

So that’s the chronic stuff. In the acute column, the first thing is just extreme lack of sleep. I hate it when people ask parents of newborns if they’re tired. I want to say, “It is not tiredness, my friend. It is sleep deprivation. The former is temporary fatigue. The latter is a form of torture.” With 4 young kids, years of insomnia, and those Today hours, my lack of sleep had reached a critical point. 

The other acute thing is that in recent years, I have met with an avalanche of grief. I’ve spoken about my dear Dad’s death more than I intended to: people keep asking, and I’m happy to answer. If you’re interested in grief, or going through it and want to know that others have survived it, please know this: it gets easier. Time is a healing balm. I had deep conversations with Gabby Logan, Jamie Laing and Gyles Brandreth about this stuff. 

My dear Dad was a huge hero figure to me at home, growing up. Out in the world, the only one of my heroes who was alive - Shakespeare, Bertrand Russell and Bob Marley being varying degrees of dead - was Shane Warne. I devoted my childhood to trying to become England’s answer to Warne (who I met properly only once, on The One Show). He died a few weeks after my dear Dad. And then a couple of years later, my best mate at University, Zaz, died. He was just 40. 

These confrontations with death taught me something that is so obvious, but which has profoundly changed my life, and which has led to your reading of these words now. Mortality is our Master. The meaning of life arises from the fact that it is finite and very, very brief. Until someone very close to you dies, I don’t really think you grasp what it means to be no more. That sounds so basic it’s almost tautological. But somehow the death of my dear Dad felt like the first moment I really grasped that I, like you, am also running out of time. He was 76 when he died; I was 38. As I said in my final link on TODAY this week, he lit my childhood, and ended it by his untimely departure. 

I strongly recommend two books that can help you grasp these truths. One is Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. The idea is: if you get to 80, you’ve got about 4,000 weeks. So by the time you’re 40, and I was 40 when Zaz died, you’ve likely only got 2000 left. And you’ll be asleep for a third of those. So that’s down to about 1,200 waking weeks. And say you’re ill for the final few years. You might only have a thousand weeks. What do you want to do with them?

Bronnie Ware is an Australian palliative nurse who spent decades with people in their final days. She noticed that the same regrets came up again and again and again. So she wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. (Since you ask: not living a life true to yourself; working too hard; not expressing your feelings; neglecting friends; and not letting yourself be happy). I had already been much influenced by Jeff Bezos’s regret-minimisation framework, inspired by his reading of The Remains of the Day. The way to approach the big decisions in life, Bezos reckons, is to ask yourself: “what would my 80 year-old self want me to have done?”. 

Somehow, that morning on the raised levels of Parkland Walk, it all came together. The weird comment I made to the Grandad in the playground; years of feeling like I can see the Golden Age and yet am not in it; a critical lack of sleep; and the hard-won wisdom to know that a slice of Time is all any of us have got, and that none of us knows how big the slice is. 

Naturally, some people would just call all of the above a mid-life crisis. I hate that phrase, because I think it’s rude and dismissive and cynical about something vital and precious: self-reflection, and the resolution to make the most of our earthly sojourn. 

I asked myself how I could minimise regret, not at 80, which felt intangible, but at 50, which felt alarmingly near. What would make my children most proud of their Dad? And then I wrote myself an email. Around a thousand words, brutally honest, about my remaining thousand weeks. I cannot recommend this exercise strongly enough to you. But it does require you to be very, very frank. 

I’m not a great believer in eureka moments, but I do think a lot about sliding doors. My life - and maybe yours - has been a series of forks in a collection of roads. Yogi Berra said, when you come to a fork in the road, take it. So take it I did.

It’s early days, and I may regret saying this, but right now I am more alive, more excited, more optimistic, fitter, stronger, and absolutely convinced that if I really want to have the thousand weeks I wrote about, leaping into the Great Digital Narnia and launching The Amol Rajan Connection is a fantastic way to go. There is so much I want to do. It is very hard. I will screw up frequently. The business I end up running will be different to the one I thought I was building. It already is. But some things won’t change. I’m going to hold firm on my principles; try to offer inspirational, strong, and effective leadership; assemble a world-class team (see below); and work like a nutter to earn your time and trust, and provide real and lasting value to you.  

Howard Beale’s demons defeated him. My demons liberated me. A year ago, I was on the edge, in more ways than one. This week, I’m flying.

The best is yet to come.

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There will be a reliable rhythm and cadence to the ARC of your week. Basically, I intend to be consistent, regular and reliable. In October, we’ll launch our first ‘Hero’ episode - the deep interview on a Thursday. By the way if you liked RADICAL, which I did for the BBC - and a lot of you did - you will love these ARC episodes. 

On Fridays, you’ll get this newsletter at around 16.00. Something for the commute home, and the weekend. 

On Monday’s, you’ll get the Questions episode, where I press the guests for answers to your Questions. We’re calling this the QUARC episodes. 

And every day, across our YouTube channel, my Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok channels, you’ll get a daily explainer. To begin with, these will probably be short - under 3 minutes. My promise to you is: give me just a few minutes of your day and I’ll slow the world down, explain the deep forces and trends shaping History, and help you Win the Future. In time, I’d like to experiment with formats.

Of course, if you’re kind enough to follow me on my social channels, you’ll get assorted other delights. I know there is a huge public clamour for some topless kettle bell swings, but I’m not sure my children would permit that. Maybe when we get to 100,000 paying Members! 

***

Over the years, a few people have noticed that I used to often wear two watches, and now always do. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that in the already-iconic ARC cover logo by Serge Seidlitz, the best illustrator of his generation, your humble correspondent is wearing two watches. People often ask, and I’ve never answered. 

So my dear Dad loved watches. He was never rich, and his childhood poverty defined and shaped him. In that way you often find with people who have been very poor, they never feel comfortable spending money on anything. He was so proud - genuinely - that the microwave we bought in 1986 was still working 35 years later. He polished his black shoes, bought from Marks & Spencer no less, daily. They lasted even longer. But watches: that was his one indulgence. He would never buy an expensive watch, of course. But if someone wanted to spend money on him, the only thing he would not feel uncomfortable wearing was a posh watch. He was given a Rolex once, and I now have it in a box. He wouldn’t wear it. What if it broke? 

He had a few watches, and passed them down to my brother and I. One of his favourites, for mechanical reasons I never fully understood, was the Citizen Eco-Drive that I now wear. It is gold in colour, but it doesn’t work for some reason. I think I’ve just never charged it properly. Frankly, I don’t know. But it is ornamental, because I don’t get the time from it. 

After he died, I wore it as a memento, a reminder of him. And I got in my head this idea that, because it didn’t tell the time, it was timeless - like him. The watch has come to represent immortality; that is, the way in which he lives on, in me. 

At the same time, I have become a bit of a health nut. Running, kettle bells, losing weight, sorting my sleep out. These things are a sudden, vast, and growing pre-occupation. And my Apple watch on the other hand is a constant reminder of the need to prioritise my health. In other words, a constant reminder of mortality. 

The reason I wear two watches is because I think life is a conversation between mortality and immortality, and I like to keep those two ideas about my person at all times. 

(All times, geddit?).

***