The future of media revealed itself in two essays.
The next creator boom, app discovery 2.0, and AI leaves planet Earth.
This week, two women I admire joined Substack: Charli XCX and Fei-Fei Li.
They operate in completely different categories.
Charli’s the pop genius behind the brat album that defined summer 2024, with a “one color, one word, one feeling” marketing playbook so effective the industry has been stuck in its shadow ever since.
Fei-Fei built ImageNet (the dataset that enabled modern AI) and now runs World Labs, teaching spatial intelligence to machines so they can understand 3D reality the way humans do. I named her as one of the top 5 people to watch from TIME’s 100 Most Influential in AI back in August, specifically because she’s building the ChatGPT for physical reality.
Charli wrote about creative depletion… how after brat consumed 2 and a half years of her life, she felt barren until Emerald Fennell offered her Wuthering Heights, which became a lifeline. A way to escape one world into another, by making music from someone else’s perspective.
Fei-Fei wrote about why AI without spatial understanding is fundamentally incomplete: “eloquent but inexperienced, knowledgeable but ungrounded.”
Both essays are long. Both are intimate. Both assume you’ll spend 15+ minutes inside their heads vs. the 15 seconds of attention that Instagram and TikTok offer. Both women are at the peak of their power. Both could command millions of eyeballs instantly on these other platforms… if they wanted to.
But they chose Substack.
We’re in the early innings of the intimacy economy.
AI-generated content continues to flood the feeds. Audience preferences are evolving from surface to substance. The infrastructure enabling this shift is being scaled right now.
Let’s get into what moved this week across AI, money, and the future of work.
