# Transcript: Featured Session: Shit You Should Care About: Live **Date:** March 16, 2026 · 10:00 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: Shit You Should Care About: Live](/sessions/2026-03-16/pp1149975-featured-session-shit-you-should-care-about-live) ## Summary Lucy Blakiston, founder of Shit You Should Care About, shared how she built a 3.4-million-follower news media company from a New Zealand flat, starting anonymously at 21 with no resources. She traced her digital skills to running a One Direction fan account at 15, discussed lessons from sudden virality (including the trap of engagement addiction), and explained why she deliberately chose not to scale — prioritizing mental health and audience trust over revenue and team size. ## Topics `media entrepreneurship` · `news literacy` · `social media growth` · `creator economy` · `misinformation` · `fan culture` · `newsletter media` · `mental health` ## Key Takeaways 1. You don't need a face to build a brand — SYSCA grew anonymously for five years, proving you can be known for your brain rather than your appearance. 2. Assume everything online is fake and verify it's real, rather than assuming it's real and checking for fakes. This inversion is essential in the AI and deepfake era. 3. Fan culture teaches transferable professional skills — editing, community management, media literacy, and content creation. The double standard that dismisses fan activities as 'cringe' while celebrating similar male hobbies is real. 4. Deliberate non-scaling is a valid strategy: Lucy keeps SYSCA at two people to protect her mental health and editorial independence, funding it through newsletters and selective partnerships. 5. Enragement is engagement — the algorithm rewards conflict. Redirect argumentative energy toward low-stakes debates ('Is milk sweet or savory?') instead of political comment sections where nothing gets solved. ## Full Transcript Lucy Blakiston, founder of Shit You Should Care About (SYSCA), started the media company in 2018 from a New Zealand university lecture theater with two best friends. Frustrated that news was boring despite studying journalism for three years, she texted Ruby and Liv proposing a blog that would distill important topics for people who don't have time. They started on WordPress, writing about everything from abortion laws to bullying on The Bachelor, then moved to Instagram where putting news in visual format was still novel in 2018. Growth was organic: 1,000 followers by December 2018, 20,000 by mid-2019, 60,000 by year end. Then COVID hit in 2020 — a perfect storm of global events, lockdowns, and everyone on their phones feeling helpless. SYSCA started daily no-bullshit COVID-19 updates. Within a month they hit 1 million followers, then 3.4 million a month later. Celebrities from Ariana Grande to Madonna followed, though some later unfollowed. Joe Rogan following remains unexplained. For the first five years, Lucy ran SYSCA completely anonymously — no faces, no personal brands, just content. This let her grow up and form her worldview without public scrutiny of her appearance or background. She pushed back against the assumption that you need a face to build a brand: if you want big brand deals, maybe, but if you're building something based on ideas, anonymity works. She only revealed her identity when publishing her book 'Make It Make Sense.' Lucy credits her One Direction fan account at age 15 as her real education: YouTube 101 (editing clips from livestreams), Twitter 101 (crafting soundbites and understanding virality), Tumblr 101 (GIF sets and Photoshop), livestreaming 101, and community management (rallying fans to vote for awards — essentially activism). She notes the double standard: her brother's cycling obsession was socially acceptable with clear career paths, while her fan account was seen as cringe, despite teaching perfectly transferable digital skills. Key lessons from sudden virality: Good attention is like a drug — she'd stay up all night replying to every comment, setting terrible expectations where anything under 10,000 likes felt like a flop. She's since stopped checking stats entirely. The internet incentivizes people to take things in the worst possible way — Cunningham's Law says the best way to get the right answer online is to post something wrong. She uses this strategically with mundane polls ('Is milk sweet or savory?') to redirect argumentative energy away from harmful debates. On fake news: Lucy used to assume things were real and check if they were fake. Now she assumes everything is fake and checks if it's real. Every post gets comments asking 'Is this real? Is this AI?' — something that never happened before. She cited the viral infographic claiming Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, which even Justin Trudeau posted before realizing it was false. Her only personal error: posting an AI-generated photo of Harry Styles. Lucy doesn't see SYSCA as competing with legacy media — she calls herself a commentator, not a reporter. Legacy media has boots on the ground; she distills and explains. During 2020's BLM resurgence, her content came from audience members writing and sending perspectives. She worries about legacy media funding and thinks putting news behind paywalls contradicts the mission of informed citizenry. Today SYSCA is just Lucy and her best friend Adley (who does design). She deliberately chose not to scale with a big team, hire managers, or chase revenue — her priority is staying happy and mentally healthy enough to keep doing the work. Revenue comes from paid newsletter subscribers (many are older people sponsoring free access for young readers), her book, and selective brand partnerships with companies she actually cares about. The newsletter (500,000 readers) is her favorite medium because algorithms can't dictate who sees it. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-16/pp1149975-featured-session-shit-you-should-care-about-live)