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The Man Who Calls it as He Feels - EP 03, Alfie Anthony Brown

Writer: Kim Skermer
Kim Skermer
6 days ago
9 min read

The Prelude


Alfie Anthony Brown. The media industry knows him well, with half wishing he kept his mouth shut. Fifteen years in PR, media, and marketing. A veteran of the City of London and the trading floors of Bloomberg. The strategic advisor the big names ring when they finally want the truth, having exhausted everyone willing to tell them what they'd prefer to hear. And my favorite, the subject of an Associated Press profile titled The Black Cat Returns. A man blacklisted by more agencies than he can be bothered to count, for the unforgivable sin of telling clients not to hand their money to the charming person across the table who was cheerfully preparing to fleece them. The dry British wit, the sarcasm you have to pause and reread to be sure you were just insulted, and the self-appointed titles he lobs out with a grin: chaos merchant, funniest bloke in the room, king of the crackheads.

And then there is the man who, the second I asked who he really is underneath all of that, went quiet and handed me an answer in two halves that flatly refuse to share a room: an unbelievable ego, propped up against crippling insecurity. A character he spent his entire life building, worn like a very good suit of armor over a scared little boy still trying to work out how on earth the world actually functions.

I see this all the time when coaching top performers. There is the space between the character a person performs and the frightened human footing the bill for the performance. This is one of the reason this show exists. We named it Wisdom in the Whispers because the truest things we carry almost never get said at full volume. They get said quietly. In a hospital bed at rock bottom. In the resentment list you are terrified to write. In the three seconds before a very funny man decides to stop being funny and tell you the truth.

This is Episode Three. This is Alfie. We chatted, we swore, and for a little while we both forgot to perform. And underneath every clever line he leads with, there is something far more useful sitting patiently, waiting for him to stop being clever long enough to say it.


Who is Alfie Anthony Brown?

Alfie is a PR and communications strategist with fifteen years in the business, most of them served inside the machinery of the City and the media world. Call pens filled a floor they called the farm, staffed by researchers they called phone pigs, whose entire job was to hunt egos ripe for the plucking. He knows precisely how the sausage gets made, on account of having spent years making it, with a smile. These days he works mostly as a strategic advisor, the person clients ring to ask, "should I be paying for this?" and trust to say no. He does not do retainers. "I like to have clients, not hostages," he says, and he has the blacklist to prove he means it.

Ask him who he is underneath the bio, though, and he does not reach for the résumé. "Who am I? That's a question I've been asking myself for thirty-five years, and one I'll continue to ask until the day I die." He is, by his own diagnosis, "a person of two sides": a monstrous ego and a crippling insecurity, sharing the one body and rarely on speaking terms. The ego, he'll tell you before you have the chance to accuse him of it, "is not real. It's a defense mechanism I've built my entire life" to guard "this scared little boy that's been running around trying to find out how the world works." And here is the bit he'd like you to sit with: as far as he can tell, everyone else is running the exact same con on themselves. "Which is the terrifying part."

He'll happily tell you he's still a child at heart, still endlessly curious, still not remotely sure where he's headed. It isn't false modesty, which is the only kind most people bother with. He genuinely doesn't believe the question "who am I?" has an answer. "I think it's a statement," he told me. "And I've spent way too long trying to answer it instead of actually existing and living life."


What is Alfie’s "whisper"?

Every one of us carries a whisper, the piece of wisdom that keeps us upright and almost never gets said out loud. When I asked Alfie for his, he didn't so much as blink. "None of this matters as much as you think it does."

Then, because he genuinely cannot help himself, he went further. "Nobody gives a shit about you as much as you ever would. Not even one percent as much as you would." The thing that feels like the apocalypse in your world today, he says, will be back to an ordinary Tuesday by next week. "The things that matter most to you right now will mean absolutely nothing in a year's time, ninety percent of the time." He would know. He has spent fifteen years being paid handsomely to make things matter for roughly twenty-four hours.

Here is the wisdom underneath it, and why it lands as a whisper and not a wound. This is not nihilism in a nice coat. In Alfie's hands it is the most freeing sentence he owns. "Whatever you do right now really isn't that important at all," he says, "and that's kind of brilliant." Once you truly accept that the mirror on the wall, the Forbes feature, the round of LinkedIn applause, none of it is the mirror that counts, you are left with the only one that does: "the one you look at every day."


The hard truths Alfie isn't afraid to say

This is the part where the funniest bloke in the room stops doing the bit, because some things are only kind if you say them straight.

Negotiate with reality, and reality wins. Every time, and without breaking a sweat. "You're not going to win if you're fighting that reality," he says, so do save yourself the years he spent losing. Whatever the situation is, the quickest way through it is to stop arguing with the fact of it.

Most of what you're chasing is vanity, and it's forgotten by next week. Here is a PR man telling you PR barely matters, which is a bit like a dentist quietly recommending fewer teeth. "I work in the world of vanity," he says, unbothered, "and acquired credibility you're paying for." Forbes, the front page, the big-name podcast: it's a pacifier, a security blanket, a very nice suit. "Nobody gives a shit next week." If you're going in expecting millions, "don't do it." The only reason to play the game at all is that everyone else is, "and in order to beat the system, you have to play the system."

The victim badge is a prison you volunteer for. "There's nothing worse than being a victim," he says, "and we live in a culture now where everyone wants to be one." The way out is deeply unglamorous and it's called accountability. In recovery he wrote a resentment inventory that took him months, because "you don't want to know the answers, even though you know them." The freedom is waiting on the far side of finding your own part in it. "If you can't find your part in something, you can't find a release from it. Ever." Take the accountability and, in his words, "you're completely and utterly free."

And running underneath all of it, the operating system he rebuilt his life on: honesty, integrity, humility. When something goes wrong, he doesn't reach for who did him dirty. He asks "where was I dishonest, where was I selfish, where was I self-seeking?" It is not soft, and it is not comfortable. It is the hardest and most freeing bit of bookkeeping a person can do.


The silent love

When the conversation turns, and the thing all the jokes had been standing guard over.

Alfie's lump in the throat was a hospital bed. He woke up handcuffed to it in St Thomas's in London, coming down off a two-week bender of alcohol, drugs, and, in his own phrase, "all sorts," having been aggressive and wild and entirely out of his mind. It was, he said, an experience he went through roughly every six months while he worked in the City, where the structure of the corporate world made those nights almost impossible to avoid. He had decided he was the king of all these people, "without realizing that I was just the king of the crackheads. I wasn't really anyone." The night before the handcuffs he had been in a gay club, running a pretend persona to charm a contact into signing a retainer, because that was the man the job had turned him into. "Insane behavior," he said. "Fun at times, but actually, when you look back on it, really sad."

Lying in that bed, the ego and the insecurity finally stopped balancing each other and simply collapsed. "I can't do this anymore." He handed in his notice within days. "I don't care if I'm broke. I don't care if I'm homeless. I can't live like this anymore." The plan was not, strictly speaking, a plan. "The plan was just leave. The plan is I'll figure it out." He lost the house. He lost everything. He slept in a car. And the biggest bump, bigger than the money or the roof over his head, was "the realization that I was an absolute twat," and that there was nobody left to blame but him. He had spent a lifetime building his behavior on because of the industry, because of my ex, because of my upbringing. "It's all bollocks. It's all because of me."

The turn came through a resentment list and a sponsor. The very first line Alfie wrote was that he resented his mother for being an alcoholic, for making him the way he is. His sponsor read it back and asked one quiet question: "But aren't you an alcoholic? Can you see the disparity here? You understand what she's going through, then." And the resentment he had carried his whole life dissolved into something closer to grace. What he found on the far side of all that accounting was not a triumphant comeback. It was, in a single word, "peace." A connection to something bigger than himself, which he refuses to dress up as anything grander than "a voice in your head that tells you to get up." The ability to wake in the morning and think, "do you know what, I feel right about yesterday. I haven't hurt anyone." He calls it "a life beyond my wildest dreams," and he means the small, quiet version of that phrase, not the one on the billboard.

When I asked him to finish the sentence "all of this is worth it because," he did the bravest thing a guest has done on this show. "The honest answer is I don't know, Kim. I'm still finding out why it's worth it. Every day I'm finding out why. And it's beautiful."

That is the silent love in this episode. Not a triumphant ending, tied off with a bow. A man who armored himself in ego and swagger for thirty-five years, sitting across from someone he trusts, admitting out loud that he is still a curious child looking for his way, and that he has finally made peace with not knowing. He told me I feed his ego when I call him endlessly curious. I'll take the risk, because the curiosity is the realest thing about him, and it is precisely the thing that has kept this particular cat alive through all nine lives.


Alfie, thank you for getting behind the mic with me.



The one action to take from this episode

If you take one thing out of this conversation and actually do it this week, make it this:

When your head starts eating you alive, get out of it by being useful to one person.

Alfie's own tool is almost insultingly simple. When the "who am I, what am I doing, where am I going" spiral starts up, and he knows perfectly well it only ever "conjures up fear, anxiety, resentment," he does not sit in it and take notes. He picks up the phone. "Why don't I call someone and ask how they are? And very quickly, that brings me out of myself." That is the assignment. One call, one message, one honest "how are you doing?" aimed at one other human, precisely at the moment your own head is the last place you should be wandering about unsupervised.


Find Alfie Anthony Brown

Alfie is exactly as blunt off the record as he is on it, possibly worse, so if you want the truth about your PR, go find him:

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