The Message Comes Before the Medium

Lucian Grey puts one question on the wall: "What is my message?" She arrived at it after a year of working out what she wanted to do next. Her path had run through design school, XR prototyping, and a startup. Now she was looking at AI through media and culture rather than only through software.

“Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you ...” - Naval Ravikant

Most builders in the room already understood code. Lucian’s talk today was about media. Social content is often discussed as a distribution problem, but she asked everyone to think about a favorite film, character, or song.

The things we return to tend to reflect something about us. Popular media, by extension, reflects something a culture is ready to recognize.

A Message a Culture Is Ready to Hear

Lucian used KPop Demon Hunters to make the point. She read its unexpected reach as a response to a generation raised around polished versions of other people's lives. Where an older kind of children's story might say to be yourself while still presenting a perfect self, this one centered shame, self-compassion, and acceptance.

Its underlying message, as she framed it, was that imperfection is allowed.

That led to the sentence carrying the session.

Good media is a message to a culture. That's a message that they are desperate to hear.

The distinction matters because it changes where the work starts. If media begins with a format, the questions are about output, style, and reach. If it begins with a message, the maker has to decide what experience or tension gives that message weight.

Lucian's own answer took the form of Willy, a small character built around will, desire, and the effort to become something.

Willy wants an apple that he cannot reach. A bee can fly to it, so Willy wants to become a bee. He can bend the world around him toward possibility, seeing a moon in a banana and a sun in a sunflower. He can make wings from leaves and build contraptions to get closer. The one thing he cannot transform is himself.

The story could have ended as a lesson about persistence. Lucian took it somewhere more useful. Willy never becomes a bee, but the wanting changes what he makes and who he meets. "Wanting bee made Willy," she said. The character makes wings, a home, and a friend. The desire produces a life even when it does not produce the original outcome.

I left with the sense that Lucian was giving builders another way to look at ambition. A goal can pull a project forward without becoming the condition for being allowed to live along the way.

The Character Became the Product

The polished story was not how Willy began. Lucian told the room that the first version was a focus app and an irreverent joke. Willy sat beside the user while they worked, with a nose that grew the longer they stayed focused. The same character gathered a different meaning once Lucian and her collaborators built the apple, the bee, and the idea of will around him.

That evolution led to a broader claim: story changes meaning, meaning defines media, and media creates culture. Then came the practical experiment. Could a character born in that process travel through AI-generated film, stickers, memes, and an interactive product without losing the human decision at its center?

The team made character sheets and mood boards, then generated an episode from a storyboard with Seedance. They turned Willy into a small desktop companion living in a terrarium. He watches while someone focuses, reacts when they get distracted, runs from a cat, and eats an apple when one grows on the tree. The surprising signal was that people kept Willy around because they liked his presence, even when they were not using the focus function.

That shifted the product question. Disney, Pixar, and Pop Mart each developed a medium that helped audiences form a relationship with their characters. Lucian wondered whether interaction could play that role for a new kind of IP. Instead of points as the reward for time spent focusing, Willy could slowly begin to talk, revealing more of his world through companionship.

The work is still an experiment. Lucian was direct about that. The team does not know yet whether the bet works. But the sequence is worth noticing: they did not begin with a chatbot and wrap it in a character. They began with a message and a character, then asked what interaction could add.

Directing the Model, Not Surrendering to It

An audience member asked how the team made interactions reproducible when generative models are inconsistent. Lucian's answer was to add structure rather than ask a model to regenerate the whole world. The team moved toward 3D so they could assemble objects, control camera angles, and produce more consistent renderings. Her framing was to act as an art director or creative director, giving AI the same pieces and constraints one would give an artist.

A follow-up went into the workflow. Storyboards alone could compress the pacing too much, so Lucian found more control by making an animatic, setting the rhythm frame by frame, generating renderings from that pacing, and only then passing the sequence into the video model. Later questions traced a stack across ChatGPT, Codex, Godot, Blender, Meshy, ElevenLabs, and Suno. The list was long, but her point was not that the stack makes the media.

That came through most clearly when she addressed AI slop. Generated code still needs a reason for someone to use it. Generated media still needs a reason for someone to care. The maker's decisions, and the internal experience behind the message, remain the source of that reason.

Lucian closed by separating product and media at their starting points. A product can begin with an external pain point. Media often begins with an internal one, something experienced that the maker needs to express. As tools make production cheaper and more abundant, that distinction becomes more important. The next question is whether interactive characters such as Willy can become a medium of their own, with a relationship that unfolds through time rather than a feed.

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SQ Collective hosts Coworking Fridays for founders, operators, and AI builders working through real product questions in Singapore.

Join an upcoming Coworking Friday: https://lu.ma/ai-labs

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Michael