Good morning. Free solo climber Alex Honnold just took his extreme sport to new heights, scaling the Taipei 101, a 1,667-foot skyscraper in Taiwan—live on Netflix.

STEM creator Mark Rober joined the hosting team, ready to calculate the physics of how fast Netflix would need to cut to commercial in case the climb didn’t go so well. Thankfully, it did.

— Hannah Doyle & Syd Cohen

Good morning, Sydizens (just something I—hi, it’s Syd—am trying out). Last Thursday, I attended the workplace meme page Assistants vs. Agents’ first award show, an IRL event honoring the best assistants in the entertainment industry. 

Here’s how this 400+ person event sold out in 24 hours.

Context: Warner Bailey (a former WME assistant) started Assistants vs. Agents (AvA) in 2018. He’s since grown the page into a full-fledged media company, including an early careers newsletter with 36K subscribers, IRL happy hours, a podcast, and livestreams at other industry events like ZCON. 

So why an awards show? “A lot of these award shows always celebrate more public figures and people who have been in their careers longer,” Bailey told us. “We wanted to celebrate the infrastructure behind it.”

And the audience was clearly bought in.

Of the 1,000+ applications Bailey and his five-person team received, AvA chose to honor nine assistants who were heavily involved in both their companies and communities. I was happy to see a digital assistant from UTA, Erica Barry, take home an award.

Zoom out: As someone who previously worked at CAA as an assistant, I share 178 followers with AvA. But unless you or someone you know works in Hollywood, it’s unlikely that AvA has come across your algorithm. And if you don’t roller skate, you probably haven’t heard of Oumi Janta, a Berlin-based creator with an IRL skate club business. 

That’s the point: Creators like Bailey and Janta are building highly engaged audiences centered around shared lived experiences (like working in a high-stress environment). In the absence of a monoculture online these days, AvA and its super-niche peers are making the case that even the most highly-targeted audiences are eager for a media company that speaks directly to them.

After five years as part of Morning Brew’s portfolio, finance education creator Katie Gatti Tassin has reacquired Money with Katie, the brand she started in 2020. In repurchasing the brand, Tassin is bringing her 200K+ subscribers to Substack and pausing her Money With Katie podcast.

Catch up quick: Tassin started Money with Katie in 2020 to teach women about personal finance. Two years later, her blog was acquired by Morning Brew, which helped Tassin grow her newsletter, launch a wealth planning product, and publish a book.

“Morning Brew is one of one when it comes to newsletter scaling,” Tassin told us. “They really understand how to build a loyal audience to a voicey news platform. [...] I have no doubt that the only reason that I reached 200K subscribers was because I was part of their ecosystem.”

Inside the incubator: Morning Brew has solidified itself as an incubator for niche finance and business creators with deals bringing in talent like Macy Gilliam and Shreyas Sinha. 

So why buy the brand back now? To focus more energy on her culture and politics podcast, Diabolical Lies. In addition to buying back the newsletter and brand IP, Tassin acquired the file to import her subscribers into Substack.

A year after the Great TikTok Ban of 2025, TikTok US is now majority-owned by American companies.

Behind the deal: After facing threats of a US ban that would cut off 200 million American users, TikTok parent company ByteDance reached a deal to split app ownership between TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC and ByteDance. 

The new ownership will allow TikTok’s American owners to “secure US user data, apps, and algorithms,” according to Reuters. 

Worth noting: After getting push notifications that the app was under new ownership in the US, several creators (including Meg Stalter and TannerTan36) have suggested their algorithms are different—for example, they’ve alleged TikToks spreading information about local ICE raids are being suppressed.