Jules Terpak is a new voice for Gen Z
The creator uses TikTok to break down tech, misinformation, and work culture.
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“On the ground” digital culture reporting is kind of an oxymoron, but Jules Terpak is pulling it off. Recently, the early 20-something made a video about Gen Z and misinformation that received over 671,000 views on TikTok, and an additional 34,000 over on Twitter. Her TikTok account, with over 269,000 followers, is a comprehensive breakdown of the issues that matter most to Gen Z. While many culture publications would lead you to believe that Y2K fashion and Euphoria makeup are Gen Z's sole obsessions, Terpak takes her generation a bit more seriously, covering things like digital wellbeing, how to prepare for virtual reality, and the ways the pandemic has changed work culture.
While Terpak went to school to study the healthcare supply chain, her first internship in the field got her interested in work culture.
“I realized how outdated so many of the practices were,” she tells me in a video call.
And after watching a video with Andrew Yang on YouTube, she also became interested in universal basic income —not only how it trickled down to work culture, but other things, like technology.
“I noticed that even the people just two years older than me didn't grow up as invested in their online personas as I did,” she says. “And at this time there was maybe one YouTube video on Gen Z. It was just not a conversation yet. That got me super interested in all the conversations of how we grew up, not better or worse, but just differently. And so all those things coincided.”
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She began making videos on YouTube and TikTok, which landed her a job with a marketing agency. She moved to New York for that, and continued making content on her own. Now, she consults with the marketing agency five to ten hours per week, and dedicates the rest of her time not just to her TikTok content, but the other opportunities it has yielded, like becoming a researcher in training at Google focused on youth insights.
Terpak sees being a creator differently than some others, using TikTok as a path to a career in reporting on technology, culture, and her generation. In this interview for paid subscribers, she shares the lengthy process that goes into making her informational videos, the importance of building an online portfolio, and the conversations she thinks Gen Z should be having.
In a recent video, you shared footage of yourself as a kid in front of the camera. Have you always been a content creator?
When I was young, I was always obnoxious in front of the camera. I watched a lot of different music videos. I remember, Kesha, which is funny, the “TiK ToK” song by Kesha, I remember I made a funny music video to that. But most times [I was] doing sit down, talking videos. I wanted to interview a bunch of, at that time it was more like celebrities, now it's more like, I wanna interview tech and business execs and stuff. I put out videos for a year and a half, two years. People found them in middle school and made fun of them, so then I stopped. But in college, and this is where it gets so confusing for people, but my parents own a gym. So I grew up into health and wellness. I was always in sports. All my friends were always asking me for health and wellness advice. Separate from my personal Instagram, I made an Instagram where I never posted personal stuff, I was just posting workout videos. It was fun to get back into creating content. This page actually grew to over 100k in 13 months, which on Instagram is pretty big growth. It got to a point where I was just like, I don't care about health and wellness this much. But that's what helped me finally gain confidence in my skills, and this all coincided with me being interested in those work culture conversations and spiraled from there.
In your videos, you’re not just talking to the camera. You’re on a kind of set, with graphics and other editing. Did you teach yourself these skills?
Yeah. Self-taught. I think people feel like they have to do this slow approach to their content. Go full out. Like when someone comes to your page, they should feel like, why doesn't this person have a bigger audience? I think people are like, “I'm at zero so I can't try to be too professional, but I'm like, [it's the opposite].”
I mean it's a very basic setup. I just have my podcast mic or ring light that I use, a green screen, which is maybe like, a hundred dollars. I have a camera that's a camera I've had for years, it's a Canon G7 X, which everyone kind of knows as a vlogging camera. I've dropped it, the screen is sideways. You don't need that much. When you're in college and maybe all this is like $500, that's a lot of money, but I looked at it as an investment.
In addition to all that, your videos are also incredibly well researched. How much time does a video take you to make, from start to finish?
So my lengthiest, in terms of how much time went into it, was "work culture's rapid change," which was a few months ago. That video I probably put close to 25 hours into, cause I was seeing all of these different narratives about why people weren't going back to work. There were, like, six different narratives and it's a lot of research you have to go through. There's a lot of sensemaking to do. So the research portion of that probably took 10 to 12 hours. Then I have to condense all of that. I'm taking these complex topics and trying to simplify them as much as possible. So the scripting for that probably took anywhere from like three to four hours, recording takes like 30, 40 minutes, and then editing takes a while too. My editing on average takes like five to six hours for videos, but typically research will only take me like three to four hours, that was kind of on the crazy end. So that's for my green screen videos. The ones where I'm kind of just sitting more casually in a chair are kind of more like maybe a public journal, more opinion-based rather than research based.
Have you found ways to monetize this?
I try to stay away from partnerships. I've done a few. The ones I've done are things that I truly use in my everyday life. It's actually something that when people start getting an audience, it's hard to learn. Like, what do I say yes to? You're getting all these inquiries. I've probably gotten over 60. I've only taken four things that I really align with.
I just don't think people realize your digital presence now is your portfolio. It's like a resume. You're not just putting internships and everything, you're really showing what you can do. The lifespan of a content creator is very short because it is a very taxing thing. I think people need to look at it more as a way to get into your ideal space, rather than, let me blow up as a content career. Cause like, what really is the goal?
What are the topics you talk about in your videos that you think are most pertinent to Gen Z?
My biggest focus lately has been digital wellbeing, and that includes everything from your digital footprint to misinformation. Digital wellbeing is a very broad term, but a lot of things go under that. Even just two years ago, right before the pandemic, companies had a social media presence, but people still talked about social media as if it was just like this thing. Now it's literally parallel to our reality. Like I said, I grew up chronically online, more invested in being online than my real-life relationships half the time. So it's kind of coming to this point where adults are also realizing this.
We don't know how even this has impacted our development growing up. We can tell in our attention span and we can tell in how we're processing misinformation. Like my video, I said every generation has a problem with misinformation, but [Gen Z] knows how to blast it off into the universe and blast it off to a million people. Because we're just so accustomed to that. In the same way that big tech leaders, obviously there's a lot of disdain for stuff that they do, but it's like, they're the first ones who have to deal with this on a cultural scale. There is no playbook for this. And now the companies are trying to push us into virtual reality. It's very overwhelming. How can we simplify it and make sense of it so that we don't get into a bigger snowball?
Are there any people you follow who inspire you in the content you make?
I'm actually really against following creators who are within your realm. It really messes with your creativity. I mean it's human nature, you're gonna subconsciously take from people.
That’s a good point. And since you mentioned you’re using this as a way into your ideal space, what does the future of your work look like?
I love interviewing people. I always wanna interview people, not in a podcast style, I just love keeping up with and dissecting culture, but I also want to incorporate those who are involved in building it more. I don't know if reporter is exactly the word. I don't really wanna get myself in the legacy media realm. I still want to stay in the individual realm, but I would love to be able to just be on top of all the current things. Not just on my lonesome in my room trying to keep up with what's going on, but actually being super involved in interviewing leaders in the spaces and being critical of it all and being able to bring people the best type of content and make sense of this crazy world. A digital culture reporter would be a way to put it.