53. We Don't Need More Influencers

We don't need more influencers. We need people who are still in contact with what's real. Kate was sitting with a double espresso, trying to name something that had been bothering her about current influence, when the culture offered the perfect example. Someone filming a hangover, mixing a cocktail, promoting a beauty product, and presenting the whole thing as authenticity. That uneasy little moment became the doorway into a much larger question: what happens when people stop asking whether something is meaningful and begin asking only whether it will perform? When visibility gets confused with credibility, vulnerability becomes another aesthetic, and authenticity itself starts to look suspiciously manufactured, the result is content that may be polished, fluent, and familiar, but still leaves us feeling wildly untouched. In this episode, Kate explores the difference between capturing attention and actually having something meaningful to say. Influence itself is not the problem. Attention matters and visibility can move culture. The question is whether the person holding that attention has stayed close enough to life to tell the truth about it. We Don’t Need More Influencers is a conversation about hollow relatability, performative insight, optimized self-expression, and the exhaustion of consuming content that asks almost nothing of us. It is also about the sea of sameness of so much online expression, the cost of abandoning your own perception in order to belong, and the rare presence of someone who still knows how to recognize what is real. This episode is for creators, writers, artists, seekers, and anyone tired of watching authenticity become another performance. We do not need more people chasing attention and calling it impact. We need people with enough originality and courage to say something true.