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I love getting recommendations from people. It's a great way to discover new things, the kind you'd never come across if left to your own devices. Human recommendations are different from algorithm recommendations. The algorithm just feeds you more and more of the same until you disappear down a hole of homogenised content.
With that said, here are my recommendations for the month of June. And remember, if you've got anything you want to recommend, please send it my way.
Media: The creators took the beach at Cannes
Every June the advertising world flies to the south of France for Cannes Lions, a week-long festival where the industry hands out awards and pats itself on the back. This year the real story wasn't any single ad. It was a shift in who actually holds the power. One of the giant advertising conglomerates gave up the prime beachfront spot it had occupied for years, and an independent upstart moved in. The festival built a whole new programme dedicated to creators, and hundreds of them turned up, podcasters, YouTubers, newsletter founders, the lot. It also ran a dedicated sport programme for the first time, with its own stretch of beach and a steady parade of athletes who, just like the creators, are done waiting for a broadcaster or a sponsor to hand them an audience. They're building their own media and their own direct line to fans. One former footballer on stage put it plainly: the power is moving away from the broadcasters. The numbers back him up. Award entries were down 25 percent, and independents made up nearly a third of them. The attention is following the person, not the platform or the agency. People now arrive carrying their own audience, their own channel, their own style, and they don't need a big company to rent them a megaphone. We've talked about this before. Narrowcasting beats broadcasting, and owned beats rented. It's now becoming the whole game, and even Cannes can feel it.
Book: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
If you've read Say Nothing or Empire of Pain, you already know Keefe is a fantastic journalist and writer. I listened to his new one on audio, and it's the kind of book that makes you sit in the car after you've parked to continue listening. It starts with a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler going off a luxury balcony into the Thames in 2019, and the official line of "probably suicide" that his parents refused to swallow. What they found was that their son had been living a second life, posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, mixing with sham entrepreneurs and a genuinely frightening gangster. What shocked me most was how readily politicians and businesses looked the other way while Russian dark money poured into London. It's really a book about parents, about how little we know the people we love most, and a city that closes ranks when money's involved.
Podcasts
This month I've got three podcasts for you, two of them from Substack's Open Tab series. First up, a shout-out to the team at Substack for this series. It's nicely produced and directed, and has so far had a really interesting roster of guests.
Kevin Kelly on Substack's Open Tab
Kevin Kelly is the bloke who founded Wired and helped build the Whole Earth Catalog. If you've been on this ride with me for any length of time, you'll surely have heard me bang on about his 1,000 True Fans essay from 2008, the one that underwrites everything people like me are trying to do here. So I was always going to listen. What I didn't expect was how much of his conversation with Substack's Hanne Winarsky, recorded in a cocktail bar that doubles as a museum to the next 10,000 years, would land as life advice rather than tech talk. His big idea is prototyping. Stop deciding what you'll do for the rest of your life and start making rough drafts of it, build one to throw away, try it for a couple of years, move on. He calls his version of the future "protopia," not utopia, just one percent better, then another one percent, forever. For a 45-plus audience told the big leap is the only valid move, that makes a lot of sense. Also optimism, he reckons, isn't a mood. It's a daily practice.
Lachlan Cartwright on catch and kill, and striking out alone
If you only know the Trump and Weinstein "catch and kill" saga from the headlines, this conversation is the version told over a dirty martini by the bloke who lived it. Lachlan Cartwright was the number two at the National Enquirer when he worked out his own paper was buying stories purely to bury them for powerful mates, and quietly became a source to blow the whole thing open while his visa hung in the balance. It's a cracking yarn on its own. But what stuck with me is everything around it. His father dying of stomach cancer mid-scandal, and the last advice he gave him, go off and do something you love. Cartwright eventually did, walking away from legacy media to build Breaker, an independent newsletter he started at the same age his accountant dad had started his own practice. Now profitable, 40,000 subscribers, and he's working harder than he ever has. For anyone over 45 wondering whether it's too late to back themselves, this one's for you. Be warned, the man swears like a trooper. Faark, we don't care.
Liam Lawson on High Performance
I'll admit the Faark, I Hope It's Not Too Late connection to a 23-year-old racing driver isn't obvious, but stick with me. Liam Lawson is the Kiwi who got handed the Red Bull seat, lost it after two races, and watched the world decide his story before he'd had a chance to write it himself. This is him taking it back. He's honest about the phone call he never saw coming, the abuse that made him mute every F1 account, and the version of his mental state the press ran with that he says could not be further from the truth. What makes it worth your time isn't the motorsport. It's getting publicly written off and having to rebuild anyway. Being judged on your worst two weeks and refusing to accept the verdict is a feeling that doesn't have an age limit.
That's June done.
The best recommendations in this newsletter come from you. So if you've read, watched, or listened to something that stuck with you this month, a book, a podcast, a documentary, a piece of media news that made you think, send it my way. Hit reply or drop it in the comments, and I might just feature it next month.