Face Value

A friend visited me in San Francisco last week, he's a reporter at Politico.

We went on a few walks and he told me that the most important part of his job has nothing to do with writing. The real work is relationship building. Cultivating sources and earning trust from people who have information they shouldn't share and convincing them, over months or years, to share it anyway.

He described his daily routine and a lot of it sounded like mine. Scrolling, messaging, posting, responding. Except when I do those things, I'm procrastinating. When he does them, he's working. His public persona online is a storefront for credibility. Every tweet about his beat, every thoughtful reply to another reporter, every thread breaking down a policy development signals to potential sources: I cover this, I understand this, and you can trust me with what you know.

Journalism has always been a relationship business. But the relationships used to be invisible, tucked behind mastheads and institutional walls. Today, they're performed in public, on platforms built for performance.

According to Gallup's September 2025 survey, 28% of Americans express trust in mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. That is the lowest reading in the poll's history, which stretches back to 1972. For context, 72% of Americans trusted the media the first time Gallup asked the question.

A separate survey tells a more interesting story: The Hollywood Reporter polled Americans about 80 individual news anchors and hosts by name. Anderson Cooper pulled roughly 60% trust. Most names on the list landed in the 40-60% range.

The same Americans who say they distrust "the media" will tell you, in the next breath, that they trust the specific person delivering it.

While the institution is bankrupt, the individual is solvent.

The instinct is to explain this as a media story. Legacy outlets got too political, too sloppy, too captured by their audiences. All true. But that diagnosis is too narrow.

The patient is lonely.

57% of Americans report experiencing loneliness, per the Cigna Group's 2025 national survey. Two in ten U.S. adults now have no close friends outside of family. In 1990, that figure was 3%. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national epidemic in 2023, noting that chronic social isolation carries health risks equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Nearly three in five Americans say no one truly knows them. I’ve thought about that statistic more than any other I've encountered writing this week’s newsletter. The majority of the country feels fundamentally unseen.

Neuroscience research shows that loneliness activates the same brain regions as physical hunger. Our bodies treat the absence of social connection the way they treat the absence of food: as a survival threat requiring urgent action. When we are starved, we eat whatever is available. When we are lonely, we connect with whatever is available.

And what is available, everywhere, all the time, is a face on a screen and a voice in your ears.

Psychologists call these connections "parasocial relationships," a term coined in the 1950s but never more relevant than right now. A parasocial relationship is one you maintain with someone who has no idea you exist.

A 2025 study published in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice found that parasocial interactions serve three psychological functions: they combat loneliness by providing companionship, they satisfy unmet attachment needs, and they fulfill the need to belong to a community organized around a shared figure.

Joe Rogan averages 11 million listeners per episode, episodes that often run 3+ hours. Heather Cox Richardson's Substack has over 2.9 million subscribers; she earns an estimated $1 million per month with no sponsors and two editors. Andrew Huberman holds a top-ten global podcast ranking and has 5.4 million YouTube subscribers making decisions about supplements and medication based on their relationship with him.

Three very different people, same underlying mechanism. Their audiences have spent hundreds of hours in their conversational presence, and the brain does not distinguish between that level of exposure and a real friendship. Intimacy does the credibility work that rigor used to do.

Huberman's case is the most revealing because the stakes are highest. He has been criticized for promoting poorly evidenced health claims and straying beyond his expertise. None of it has dented his audience. The trust his listeners feel is rooted in parasocial exposure to a calm, credentialed face explaining how their bodies work. The relationship feels like having a brilliant doctor friend and the fact that he is not their doctor, and has no obligation to them as patients, does not register.

The advertising and tech industries figured out what the media industry is still processing: the human face is the most efficient trust delivery mechanism ever discovered, and loneliness has made it more powerful than any brand asset a corporation can build.

I tracked this today. Of the first fifteen ads served to me on Instagram, eleven featured a single person talking directly into their phone camera. These were typically close up, in what appears to be their living room or car, and designed to register the same as a friend sending a video just for you.

The influencer marketing industry reached $32 billion in 2025 and 93% of marketers say user-generated content outperforms traditional branded content. The word "authentic" appears in every report explaining why, and it deserves interrogation. When consumers say a person talking into their phone feels more "authentic" than a brand-produced ad, they are describing a neurological response. The face activates social processing circuitry that a logo cannot. In a country where three in five people feel fundamentally unseen, that signal is irresistible.

Tesla has spent essentially nothing on traditional advertising. Elon Musk made himself the product's most visible evangelist, with nearly 200 million followers on X acting as the world's largest unpaid marketing channel. Increasingly, CEOs are delivering their quarterly earnings via selfie videos. The press release is dying and the face is winning.

We are gravitating toward individuals because our brains are starving for social connection and cannot distinguish between a real relationship and a face talking into a camera. That is a statement about vulnerability, about a society-wide deficit in the kind of connection that used to come from family dinners, neighborhood bars, religious institutions, and the thousand small encounters that composed daily life before we retreated into our screens.

The individuals filling this void are not, in most cases, more accountable than the institutions they're replacing. Rogan has no editorial standards, no corrections policy, no legal team fact-checking claims before they reach 11 million ears. Huberman's health recommendations have been challenged by the scientific community he claims to represent. Influencers routinely fail to disclose paid partnerships, and of course, founders oversell their products.

Trust in institutions collapsed because institutions earned their decline. Decades of access journalism, editorial capture, the pivot from accuracy to engagement metrics. The media stopped doing the thing that made it worth trusting, and people noticed.

But the thing that replaced institutional trust is arguably worse. We traded editorial standards for parasocial warmth. We chose intimacy over accuracy because loneliness made intimacy feel like the more urgent need.

That trade has consequences we haven't fully reckoned with. Institutions, for all their failures, operated under structural constraints: editors, fact-checkers, legal review, public corrections. The individuals replacing them operate under one constraint: audience retention. When your accountability mechanism is whether people keep watching, the incentive is to be trustworthy enough to maintain the parasocial bond, not trustworthy enough to be right.

If you are building a company, the implications are tactical. Your founder brand is now your most valuable marketing asset, whether you intended it to be or not. Press releases, polished brand campaigns, and institutional credibility signals are losing ground to a founder in a T-shirt recording a selfie video. This is the reality of selling to a lonely society and ignoring it is leaving money on the table.

If you are consuming information, the implications are harder to sit with. Every person you feel you "know" through a screen, every newsletter writer whose voice you hear in your head, every podcast host whose opinions have quietly become your own: those relationships feel real, and that feeling is doing the work of credibility. The warmth you feel toward these people is only evidence that you are human, and that your brain is doing what brains do when they are hungry for connection.

I write this newsletter. I am, by definition, a face asking for your trust. I show up in your inbox every week and tell you what I think about the world, and over time that repetition builds a familiarity that mimics friendship. The least I can do is name it.

Our current “face economy” is the logical endpoint of a society that has optimized for everything except human connection. We built platforms that connected billions and left most of them lonelier than before. We dismantled the institutions that once filtered our information and now wonder why we cling to whichever individual face makes us feel seen.

Our attention is the most intimate thing we give away. We should be deliberate about who gets it, and honest about why they're there.

Up and to the right.