💫What Inspires You? 💫

Aug 18, 2022

Angels, you are not going to want to miss tomorrow’s Culture Vulture newsy. Not only are you hearing Liv’s magic words on the myth and mystery of ‘The 27 Club’ but you’re also hearing a story that I’ve been gate-keeping from you. It’s about me getting trolled on Twitter the other day for the SMALLEST thing and how it made me feel (it’s also to do with Harry Styles so 👀👀👀.)

You’re also getting some killer recs from Liv this week, so if you’re not already a monthly or annual supporter and you want this in your inbox every Saturday then I suggest you become one!!

Woah!! I am a worn-out woman this week!! Thanks for sticking with me through the dentist, warrant of fitness, hangovers and all of the news in between. I need an incredibly big sleep tonight because tomorrow night is the Voyager Awards (NZ’s media awards) and I’m a finalist for ‘Editorial Leader of the Year’ which is 🥺🥺🥺 and 🤯🤯🤯. Big ups to NZ media for recognising us tbh! Can’t wait for Liv, Rubes and I to put on a frock and imposter syndrome our way through the evening!

I also wanted to give you all a lil Dungeons and Dragons update!! Liv, Rubes and I met with our podcast producer/ bestie/ soon-to-be Dungeon Master earlier in the week for our “session zero” where we learnt a little bit about our world, how to build our characters, how the game works etc and have been given some homework to prep us for our first sesh next week!! We’re all so excited to dive headfirst into this (and judging by how many of you in the SYSCAhood also play you’ll be excited to hear about it too!!) Can’t wait to use this silly lil imagination of mine for pure fun and vibes and adventure.

What inspires you?
An office day in the life!
The Boy Bosses of Silicon Valley Are on Their Way Out
Andrew Tate Explained
Is this a carousel or a merry go round?

What inspires you?

I wanted to do something dif for the start of this newsy, because I was recently asked this question in an interview and I found it incredibly hard to answer. I think that’s because (and Bel helped me come to this conclusion) quite literally everything inspires me. Being alive inspires me. Which is why (as Bel again put it) I can do this job/ write about literally anything/everything - I’m truly excited by everything! I think it’s a nice question to ask your mates/ yourself because when things stop inspiring me, I think it’s a pretty good marker that I’m heading into a lil low point and am probs putting too much energy into the wrong things (uninspiring things).

Anyway, I asked the characters in our SYSCA universe about what inspires them because I thought it would also be a cute way for you to all get to know them better too. Here's what they said:

Rubes:

“Lol you guys for sure! Travel, books defs, shamefully, TikTok at times but that goes the other way also.”

Liv:

“I’d say my friends and their vibes, anyone doing anything shamelessly authentic, art blogs, nature, album covers/music posters and TIKTOK for videos for all of the above

anyone making anything is inspiring to me lol”

Bel:

Bel and I had this chat in person so I’m going to do my best to summarise it as beautifully as she did. Bel feels like her purpose in life is to help people feel seen (as she does so wonderfully in every chime.) So things that make her feel seen inspire her (she says it’s more of a feeling than a thing, but also movies, books, poetry, people), and she’s also inspired by other people who help people feel seen. Does this make sense? She said it waaaay nicer than that, but I hope you get the vibe.

Squish:

Squish said: "other people mostly" and when I pushed further and told him I needed it for the newsy he didn't reply (even though he's on his phone 24/7 👀)

Dunc:

Before Dunc responded to my weird question I had an idea of what he was going to say. Duncan is an incredible people see-er (to reference Bel). He saw me/ SYSCA when we were a lil insta page and employed me, dealt with it when I quit 3 months later, kept in contact with me, and is now a massive reason that SYSCA is what it is today. Anyway, he typically wrote exactly what I expected and it’s the cutest shit ever:

“Honestly corny but true answer is people in their twenties. A whole damn generation. Like I remember so vividly that time in my life and this immense sense that there was this thing happening (media) that I wanted into so badly and had no idea how to do it and it fucking broke me. And now I see people everywhere (like um… the author of this newsy and my colleagues at The Spinoff/Daylight/HWP and honestly my own daughter, hi Jett) who have this wild combo of energy and ambition and big ol brains and are just totally fearless and every time I see it I just kinda melt and think the world cannot help but be OK with who is inheriting it.”

And it goes without saying that all of you inspire me every damn day! What inspires you? I’d love to know 🥺🥺

An office day in the life!

We get so many of you asking how/where we work, so we made a lil day in the life to show you!!! We work in a really amazing building with The Spinoff, Daylight Creative & Hex Work Productions (we have our own lil SYSCA zone), but we’re often travelling around, or podcasting from bedroom floors, or writing the newsy from bed (we work from everywhere, basically.) This week though, we've all been in the office for a WHOLW WEEK and it's been a real pleasure!!

Also, our SYSCA supporters are the angels who help us pay rent/ let us actually feel and be a lil profesh - so thank you!! And if you aren’t yet supporting us but you want to, then you should 🥺🥺🥺

A day in the life running SYSCA, 💘office edition💘 — www.tiktok.com

COME JOIN US ON TIKTOK

New episode of The Shit Show

Andrew Tate, Explained - The Shit Show — open.spotify.com

Who the fuck is Andrew Tate and why is he everywhere? Today we deep dive into the dude who's got us blocked on every platform and is causing chaos in schools. Listen wherever you get your pods!

The Boy Bosses of Silicon Valley Are on Their Way Out

Back in December last year I wrote about Big Tech’s first generation of founders starting to step aside, here’s what I wrote back then:

Big tech’s first generation of founders starts to step aside

Loved this from The Verge. We could see it happening, but I guess I hadn’t really thought about all the OG tech bros starting to pass the baton as a phenomenon, or ‘end of an era’ vibe. Founders of some of the companies that formed the world we live in now are starting to step down or step aside, and while it leaves a whole lot of unknown (what will a post-Dorsey Twitter look like?) it’s also kinda exciting.

Here are a few examples via The Verge:

Twitter — On Monday, November 29th, Jack Dorsey announced he was leaving Twitter, and said: “I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders.”
Amazon — In July 2021, Jeff Bezos officially handed the CEO position of Amazon over to former Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy.
Apple — Around the time of his 10-year anniversary as CEO of Apple in 2021, Tim Cook said he doesn’t intend to run the company for another decade.
ByteDance — Zhang Yiming, founder of the company that owns TikTok, announced he’d be stepping down as CEO this May. In an internal letter, he said he worried about “relying too much on the ideas I had before starting the company.”
Google — In August 2015, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved on to overseeing Alphabet, the holding company for Google’s disparate properties. The shakeup was seen as them taking their hands off the search engine company, leaving Sundar Pichai in charge, and in 2019 Pichai took over as CEO of Alphabet as well.
Instagram — In September 2018, Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced they were stepping down, reportedly after major disagreements with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.
Netflix — In July 2020, Ted Sarandos joined Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as co-CEO.

No one gets a prize for spotting who is missing from this list :-)”

Now The New York Times reports that the ‘young kings’ of Silicon Valley are ‘dismounting their unicorns.’

“They’re writing sentimental blog posts that outline their legacies. They’re expressing hope for their companies’ prospects. They’re quitting their jobs leading the start-ups they founded.”

This comes after Ben Silbermann (co-founder of Pinterest) resigned as CEO, Joe Gebbia (co-founder of Airbnb) announced his departure, and Apoorva Mehta (founder of Instacart) announced he would be finishing up when the company went public. It might not be that interesting to you, but it feels a lil bit like the end of an era of these ✨revolutionary✨ founders being at the helm of these ✨revolutionary✨businesses. The world is changing, the economy is making the ‘scale scale scale’ vibe harder and scarier, and tbh if I was these dudes I’d be out too. I’m sure it’s all fun and games being a visionary founder/ CEO when things are going swimmingly, but when you’re sinking it must be easy to feel… out of your depth. Sorry for that analogy, but here’s the rest of the NY Times article if this is interesting to you at all!