Jared Ray Johnson (JRJ) is a NYC-based marketer and entrepreneur. I was originally introduced to him by Joe Cohen from from Infinite Machine. Happy to have him with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a marketing consultant based in NYC and I work with ecommerce and consumer tech brands but this makes up a relatively small percentage of my time in the present. I’m currently on a sabbatical in which I’m taking fiction writing workshops and working on my first novel.

In the past, I founded a footwear brand named Season Three, led marketing at a couple of other young companies, and moved to New York out of college to work for a bank. More so than jobs, my north star has long been learning and that impulse has taken me to a software engineering bootcamp, nude figure drawing classes, and to a commencement ceremony at MIT on a Saturday and another at Harvard on a Sunday.

A part of me thinks this is a missed opportunity to market myself but, until I complete and publish a novel, I have nothing to market. The desire to self-promote feels a distant memory to me mid-career break or pivot or whatever this becomes in some future re-telling but the desire to connect is ever-present.

Describe your media diet.

I’ve been on somewhat of a news detox. Ninety-percent of my reading is novels. I read a handful of trending features in The New Yorker or New York Magazine or The New York Times every day, sometimes a piece or two from The Financial Times via the FT Edit app, which is by far the most cost-effective way to get access to their good stuff. I used to subscribe to The Wall Street Journal as well but recently cancelled my subscription as they’ve raised their prices and I’ve found myself consuming far fewer news and opinion articles. I’m not gunning to be the subject of a piece on information blockades—I do value staying current with happenings on a local, federal, and global scope—but I would rather treat my mind to stories that spark and interrogate my thoughts rather than stories that engender frustration and, more than I’d like to admit, apathy.

Podcasts are an exception. I rarely miss a new episode of The Ezra Klein Show. I listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. I’m not as religious about The Daily but I’ll tap in for an interesting story. Soaring above all these, though, is The Bill Simmons Podcast. I love sports and sports commentary and find Bill Simmons’ often absurd tendency to frame new developments in historical context irresistible. A 30-minute segment ranking the best NBA finals runs of all time is my heroin, or TikTok for that matter.

I call myself bad at watching tv because my love for sports runs so deep that I would rather watch a shitty NBA game over whatever TV show is ruling the zeitgeist. I’m also slow to get through a series and never binge; I’m often content to understand an idea or concept and never need to see another episode.

I subscribe to several Substacks but I feel overwhelmed by them. As a marketer, I understand the content whitespace that exists in email but as a practice I do not open my inbox with intent to spend more than thirty seconds with any message. The only ones I tend to give much attention to are fashion-oriented, Blackbird Spyplane and street night live among others, and I figure this is the case because I like looking at clothes.

What’s the last great book you read?

I just finished reading Blood Meridian for the first time and while it more than qualifies as a great book, the book I’d rather talk about is The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolanõ. It’s a little hard to describe the plot, at least in a sensible way, but this is truly a book for people who love literature. Okay, here’s my attempt: the story follows two young poets, the founders of a counter-cultural poetry movement cheekily named visceral realism, from Mexico City in the 1970s through several other countries and continents over the course of a couple decades as they search for the spiritual founder of their movement, a poet who only ever published one poem. The book’s format is unlike anything else I’ve ever read with several hundred pages of first-person accounts from dozens of acquaintances of the main characters.

What are you reading now?

I’m about to begin reading Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis but, as I’m on page one, I can’t tell you anything about it. However, I’m choosing to read it because I’ve heard it shares a lot of themes, namely celebrity culture and excess, which I’m interested in for my own writing. I’m new to this but I’ve noticed just how different it is to read as a writer versus for pleasure. I read to deconstruct and understand nuances in style and structure more than I read to be thrown into an entertaining story. Of course, it’s nice to have the latter but in the end the books that stay with me are the ones I found innovative or novel in some way even if I forget the entire plot.

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

So let’s take The New Yorker. I like to read in order without backtracking but I don’t choose to read everything. I’ll usually skip the index and I don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s inside before I get to it. My decision to dig in and read something is pretty vibes-based, though sometimes I recognize one of my faves like Jia Tolentino or Patrick Radden Keefe or Cal Newport and that’s enough to grab my attention. Also sometimes I realize that I’m going to get around to everything that piques my interest before it’s pulled away in some other direction and so I’ll pull up a digital version and use the Pocket app to save it for reading later.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

That’s hard to say. I don’t think I hold the opinion that there is anyone who everyone should be reading. But I do think everyone should read more, and by ‘read’ here I mean consciously giving a written work your attention for more than, say, fifteen minutes at a time. I don’t think this is something too obvious to mention. I believe most people overstate how much they read because we’re surrounded by pseudo-reading material, think social media or incessant news updates. Reading, to say nothing of what’s happening with younger generations whose attentional capacity has been zapped by short-form video content, is a habit that is easy to let fall to the wayside. Maybe there’s a shame component as well and if so, I’m here to say it’s okay if you haven’t read a novel since high school. Just start somewhere and I think you’ll be happy you did.

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

Maybe this is cheating because I feel confident this app will soon be famous but the last app that wowed me is Doji, an app that uses AI to generate an avatar for you that can try on luxury clothing. I use a lot of conversation AI applications but I haven’t jumped too deep into the image generation stuff because I don’t have a practical need for my own slop. Doji smartly takes a lot of design cues from sites like SSENSE and the ability to create myself as an SSENSE model and see a decent approximation of what different outfits might look like on me is pretty cool. I’m sure they will figure out a way to build themselves into a shopping destination or maybe they’ll license their technology to retailers—either way, I’ve seen enough to be convinced of Doji’s utility in ecommerce.

Plane or train?

I don’t like traveling and the worst part of it is the plane, train, car or other means that stands between me and whichever destination I’m headed to. That said, the plane typically gets me there faster so I’ll go with that.

What is one place everyone should visit?

I’m tempted to be pedantic and answer this question similar to the way I answered the one on reading but I’ll instead say Mexico City, which in of itself feels pretty cliché. My defense is that a city so large with so many people and so many places and so much history cannot be ruined by popularity and any suggestion to the contrary relies on a deeply cynical view of the world and the purpose of travel.

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

This is a bit dark but I recently read about a man on death row in South Carolina who elected to be executed by firing squad, choosing that over lethal injection and the electric chair. This led to my learning of another form of execution, used recently in the state of Alabama, called nitrogen hypoxia or inert gas asphyxiation. I’ll spare you the details but I encourage you to look it up. That we consider ourselves a civilized society and resort to such depravity is a shame, a humorless shame. (JRJ)