We often theorize about it, but I'm curious to know as someone who's studying the matter so strongly.

Before my husband and I did a rewatch of Sex and the City, we did Girls and it was his first time for that too.

And so this is like very fresh in my mind.

I think it's because the characters are so incredibly candid and like humans.

And I think that Gen Z, I mean, it's funny to tell you two who are Gen Zers.

But I think that Gen Z tends to gravitate towards things that feel very human and real because they're just so tired of like the polished content.

And I think that it's interesting because Girls kind of had a resurgence even before AI took over the feeds.

other a lot in a lot of ways, but not in ways that maybe lend themselves to sex.

What percentage of your income is newsletter versus, like, all of your additional consulting work and speaking engagements and all of that?

So to even zoom back to the newsletter, it's probably a third subscriber, a third paid partnerships in the newsletter, which I don't do a ton of, and then speaking is probably a third as well.

Like, this one I did this week was, "You, big company, have been studying Gen Z for years.

You know how old they are.

You know the sort of broad strokes.

Here's what is happening right now, here's what's next, and here's what you should be thinking about Gen Alpha." A lot of it references back to the newsletter.

Like, every day I'm researching and researching and researching.

The first one is about mistakes, because we all make them over the course of our career, and we don't always talk about them, but I think it's really important for women to hear stories of failure or mistake and then resiliency that comes with it, and to say, like, "You can make a giant mistake and still come back from it." So can you tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career, and what you've learned from it?

I mean, stands to reason.

Um, but no, I, I think that we're seeing a lot of movement of, of brands thinking that they should engage with Substack in one way or another, and I think that a lot of these agencies are hearing from their clients.

You know, there, there's just a lot of interest in Substack, and I think there is, um, the understanding of what the what is is a, a little murky sometimes.

Um, uh, with American Eagle, their agency of shadow, they're amazing to work with, and it was very clear that the entire team a- as well as their agency understood the Substack ecosystem.

But they also were approaching it very much as a, this is a platform that we should experiment with versus a...

I don't...

A lot of times when a brand is launching on a new platform, you really have to have the, like, six month to [laughs] year-long, like, investment, or you can think of it as an exper- experiment.

You do talk about Gap a lot.

But for you, Casey, since you're in it every day, how do you balance this idea of, like, keeping track of the trends and like what are those trends while also like noting the iterations that happen and not letting those small iterations or small moments define an entire trend.

This is a perfectly timed question because I'm working on the newsletter right now.

And I saw that Harper's Bazaar published a story that was about the romanticizing one's nine to five TikTok trend, which, you know, this is something that's been evolving for a while.

But I looked up and actually in 2022, New York Times had written about the romanticizing one's office life trend.

And so I'm looking at these articles like, is there anything new here? Are there any new takeaways that we can possibly take? It's just hard to understand, but a lot of times with culture reporting and these trends sort of coming back with a very small change or like, I want to know how have we advanced a little bit or is this simply a publication sort of trotting, you know, the same trend that was covered, you know, three years ago, four years ago, five years ago.

So I think, you know, with research, it's like constantly digging a little bit deeper to say, is there anything truly new here? And a lot of times, like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, they'll cover these trends like what we would feel is a little late, but the reporting is so good.

They're actually interviewing sources.

You're reporting that and your thoughts and takeaways from all that went on with the 13-year-old skincare CEO.

Mm-hmm.

And so their screen time has always been so...

You know, they're sort of, like, babysat.

So will they think that being able to be unplugged equals luxury? Uh, not at first, I don't think.

But for Gen Z and also Millennials, the 2026 ins and outs TikToks that I watched, being offline was a huge in, brain rot, a huge out.

All of these words around, like, being super online and, you know, knowing these sort of, like, week-to-week, day-to-day trends isn't cool anymore.

It's much better, a- according to the ins and outs, to be unplugged, to read books, to limit your screen time in the morning.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, God.

Oh, man.

But in terms of optimism, I mean, I only speak for my own experience and for those, you know, some of my friends.

But I moved here.

I graduated from the University of Missouri studying journalism.

I moved here with a media job at a startup at this point.

I was I think my salary was like twenty seven thousand dollars.

With like bacon jam.