Signals for what’s next – and what matters
Health ⎪ Innovation ⎪ Society
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Hey Reader,
The world is crumbling and there is a new realignment of power.
Institutions are fading and decentralized networks and AI are rising. In this environment whole industries will be reshaped on a trust versus influence matrix.
Trust is sustained attention over time. More precisely, it is a “confident relationship with the unknown.” It’s the new currency in era when almost all traditional players are no longer considered honest brokers.
Its value is precisely because it is so scarce. Trust may be the rarest commodity in the world right now.
Influence is the ability to move players across networks to act in concert. Soft power > hard power.
In the new world, the future of your business depends almost entirely on your ability to leverage trust and influence.
Audience Matters
The second you reach out to a new business (or even romantic partner) in any new interaction, two questions immediately enter their mind (consciously or not).
- Who is this person?
- What do they want from me?
A compelling source of trust and influence can glide past this gauntlet and convince others to work/date you.
All of marketing – whether brochures, TV ads or Tinder profiles – reduces down to these two claims.
Thrive or Dive: Matrix of Trust x Influence
High Influence/High Trust – These players will thrive.
- the future doctor or educator that leverages AI for patients and students
- creators & entrepreneurs that go for authenticity and value creation, not just virality and marketing funnels.
- AI bots in certain social roles
High Influence/Low Trust – Technocratic Risk Zone. Efficient at what they do but distrusted. Opacity, elitism, and broken incentives reign here.
- Most hospitals & insurers
- Big Tech, Big Pharma
- Financial institutions that are extractive
Low Influence/High Trust – Sleeping Giants. They are ripe for re-invention.
- “The good doctor”
- PBS and NPR; non profits
- Religious groups or clergy with broad public support but outdated tools and limited modern presence
Low Influence/Low Trust – The Dead Zone. The age of disruption will be swift and merciless here.
- Large hospital bureaucracies with poor UX and poorer outcomes
- Governmental services neither functional nor accountable (DOGE is a corrupted attempt to address this problem)
Together or Separate
Influence and trust, of course, are not static but dynamic and not separate but interrelated.
It creates a virtuous or vicious cycle where power – the combination of trust and influence – either aggregates and compounds exponentially or leads to a downward spiral.
But the counter-vailing trend is that trust is becoming more distributed across networks and away from organizations or individuals.
The people and entities that navigate these trends will have outsized returns.
So we have a winner take all phenomenon.
This is why the richer get richer and the poor get poorer.
It’s not punishment just the dynamics of our market.
Postscript
A world in which everyone has an opinion, a microphone and a megaphone is a world the lives and dies by the wisdom (or folly) of the crowds.
It’s a world where marketing (and manipulation) take center stage. True authenticity can remain in the shadows if we are not careful.
And will trust and influence in AI – so called autosapient trust – be evaluated in the same way as people?
These are hard questions that have no easy answers.
I do know, though, our world is becoming both clearer and more opaque.
We used to trust institutions by default. Now we trust people by instinct.
The future belongs to those who are trusted – not just followed.
Tomorrow Can’t Wait,
