This week was weird. Yesterday, I felt like Alice in Wonderland in her “curiouser and curiouser” era as I researched my way down a rabbit hole into a corner of the internet I didn’t even know existed…
Gen Alpha podcasts.
It started after I saw this article highlight how a YouTube show called Pucker Up had outranked Joe Rogan on the weekly charts.
This meant a bunch of 15 -year-olds hanging out, gossiping, and flirting on camera was scaling past the most dominant voice in podcasting history.
So of course I had to know more. I went to TikTok to figure out who these kids were and quickly realized I was stumbling into an entire ecosystem. One of the Pucker Up guests had 4.1M followers, with their most popular videos often teasing their crushes or “ships”, casually pulling in 2.6M views per post. For context, when I was posting boyfriend photos on MySpace in high school, I was thrilled with 100 likes.
It also struck me how different their media is compared to what Millennials and even Gen Z grew up with. There are no guest intros, no effort to pull you in. Just press record, hang out, and let the audience observe.
Gen Alpha’s spending power is projected to grow to $5.5T by 2029, so this isn’t just teen drama. Decentralization of cultural authority is happening in real time. Every builder, investor, and brand operator should be paying attention to the media playbooks being written in bedrooms, including the formats, distribution, and fandom dynamics that will shape the next decade.
Now, let’s get into what else moved this week across money, AI, and the future of work.
Future of Money meets Social
Robinhood Social launches early 2026. I tuned into Robinhood’s HOOD summit this week to observe their new product announcements and was most stoked about Robinhood Social. Verified traders, verified trades. And you get to follow along in real time in their new social feed. In crypto, people already track whales and mirror their moves to make money. Robinhood looks set to normalize that behavior for equities, making trading more accessible to millions. It’s one of the most Rich Future-coded infrastructure plays I’ve seen all year.
My prediction is Robinhood Social will be the biggest platform to watch in 2026 if you care about how capital, community, and culture converge together.
Future of AI
Oracle and OpenAI sign a $300B Cloud Deal in a five-year agreement. To put that in perspective, that’s on par with Canada’s entire national budget. AI infrastructure has officially moved out of startup economics and into nation-level economics. I used Oracle’s product, NetSuite, back when I was head of accounting in tech. It’s interesting to now see Oracle reposition itself from “legacy enterprise software” to critical AI utility provider. OpenAI, for its part, is diversifying across multiple infra partners to spread risk and secure scale. The size of this contract gives us a clear proxy for OpenAI’s demand appetite.
AI isn’t about software anymore. It’s becoming the utility grid of our generation. Compute and energy are the new rails, and whoever controls them controls the future economy. As I’ve covered across this brief and this brief, pick-and-shovel plays are what will quietly outperform the flashier AI apps everyone’s chasing today.
Future of Marketing
Koah raised $5M to solve a huge problem for consumer AI: monetization. Subscriptions have carried the first wave of apps, but they don’t scale globally. Few users in Latin America or Asia are paying $20/month for a ChatGPT subscription. Koah’s bet is that embedded ads will become the economic backbone of AI apps, just as they did for web and mobile.
Early partners have included Forerunner, Luzia and DeepAI, with some pretty impressive results. Click-through rates are 3–5x higher than traditional internet display ads.
What I’m seeing across the macro environment is that conversational intent is one of the richest forms of ad targeting. When a user asks about business strategy or skincare routines, that moment of intent is clearer than a scroll or a like. This creates both monetization opportunity and risk. Once ads enter chats, manipulation is inevitable, especially given how dependent millions of people already are on these tools.
Builders who integrate ads transparently and design them to feel useful will not only earn loyalty from users but also build strong reputational capital. Since we’re in the midst of a “trust crisis” in AI and media, I’d say reputation capital will compound faster than any Year-1 ad revenue for those who get it right.
Future of Banking
The Rise of Machine Banking. Aven just raised a $110M Series E at a $2.2B valuation to build what it calls America’s first “machine banking” platform. The company pioneered a credit card that gives homeowners access to their equity through a credit card with rates up to 50% lower than traditional cards. Plus 2% cash back because… why not. Now it’s expanding into mortgage refinancing, with the same promise: faster approvals, lower costs, and automation at scale.
We’re witnessing a profound shift from income-based lending to asset-based lending, with Aven accelerating that shift.
Traditional consumer credit models fixate on pay stubs, FICO scores, and employment history. Creators, founders, and operators with irregular income get penalized.
Machine banking flips that equation by looking at what you own (home equity today, potentially other assets tomorrow) rather than how smooth your income appears on paper.
For builders and investors, this is a major unlock. It means cheaper credit lines for those with assets, even if you don’t fit the legacy profile of a “prime borrower.” It reframes financial access away from salary stability and over into balance sheet leverage. I expect this shift to ripple across the entire consumer finance landscape.
Zooming out, here’s a few quick Rich Future signals to add to your radar this week:
Gen Z’s “Great Lock-In” trend is being positioned as the rejection of “soft life” millennial culture. Young people are reframing the last 120 days of 2025 as grind season. I’m predicting we will see an uptick in burnout content by December.
California Senate passes AI safety bill SB 53. It’s now waiting on Newsom’s signature. This bill calls for more transparency in AI safety protocols, while adding whistleblower protections. Anthropic is in favor of it.
40% of U.S. adults are now “always online.” What’s even more striking to me is that the number rises to 54% for the 35–49 age group. It erases the assumption that only Gen Z is hyper-connected.
Clyx raises $14M for IRL social apps. The loneliness economy is alive and well. Investors keep betting on in-person friend-making platforms as a counterbalance to the “always online” life.
ICYMI…
I published a post this week on the dangers of depending on one paycheck in 2025. If you’re in that boat or know someone who's anxious about AI disrupting jobs, this one’s worth reading. Better yet, send it to them.
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