The Audience Is Developing Antibodies

A guy polls his followers on whether he should launch another financial vehicle. 55,000 people vote. Over 70% say no. His response? "No crying in the casino." He launches anyway. Raises $345 million. Five times oversubscribed.

Meanwhile, his previous investors are sitting on losses of 70 to 98 percent.

He does not care. And the thing is — he doesn't have to.

Because by the time his old audience figured out what happened, a new audience had already taken their place. Fresh money. Fresh trust. Same playbook.

I've been watching this pattern for a while now, and something is changing. Not at the top — the extractors are fine, they'll keep extracting.

What's changing is at the bottom. The audience. The people who used to show up, listen, trust, and open their wallets.

They're developing antibodies. And it's happening fast.

The Reflex

I was scrolling through a tech subreddit last week. Not a political one — a neutral AI community where people debate model benchmarks and share research papers.

Someone posted a clip of a well-known tech podcaster giving a take on AI.

The most upvoted comment wasn't about the take. It was about the person.

"These people are the biggest grifters of our time. They don't say anything that doesn't benefit themselves. Nobody should trust what they say."

Hundreds of upvotes. In a subreddit about transformer architectures and inference costs.

Now here's why that sat with me. This wasn't someone who disagreed with the take and wrote a counter-argument. That's normal. That's healthy.

This was someone who saw a face and rejected everything that came after it. Automatically. Before processing a single word.

That's not disagreement. That's reflex.

And there's a meaningful difference between the two. When you lose an argument, people still listen to you next time. They push back harder, they're more skeptical, but the gate is open. They're still processing.

When you lose trust past a certain point, something different happens — the brain stops allocating cognitive resources to evaluating you entirely.

You get filed under "not worth processing" and that category is essentially permanent. The brain would have to spend energy re-evaluating something it already decided isn't worth the energy. It's a loop that reinforces itself.

That's what happened in that Reddit thread. The face appeared. The gate closed. Done.

And the data says this isn't one guy on one thread. It's structural.

The Collapse

Only 7% of Americans trust tech CEOs to make policy decisions that affect their lives. Seven percent. Congress has a 13% approval rating and that's considered historically catastrophic.

Tech leaders are now less trusted than the institution Americans love to hate.

But the trajectory is what matters. Global trust in AI companies dropped from 61% to 44% in six years according to Edelman, and the steepest single drop — 9 points — happened in the last year alone. It's not stabilizing. It's accelerating.

Consumer preference for AI-generated content crashed from 60% in 2023 to 26% in 2025. Two years. That's all it took for the audience to go from "this is exciting" to "I don't want this."

And these aren't separate trends. They're the same trend. The people building AI, promoting AI, and monetizing AI audiences are increasingly understood as the same class — and that class is being rejected as a unit.

54% of Americans now reject the growing use of AI. Not "have concerns." Reject. One in three don't trust any tech CEO. 72% support taxing Big Tech — including 60% of Republicans. When you've lost the right on taxation, you've lost something that doesn't come back with a PR cycle.

But the number that really landed for me: 54% of Trump's own voters believe tech CEOs' political alignment is "just an act." Think about that.

The audience pattern-matched the performance even through their own partisan lens. Even the people who should want to believe these guys are on their side... don't.

This isn't a bad news cycle. This is a generational revaluation of who gets trusted.

The Pipeline

So how does it happen? How do people who started with real credibility end up as the punchline of a Reddit thread?

The pattern is always the same. Three stages. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

It starts with trust.

Someone with real credentials starts sharing publicly. Operator background, investor track record, genuine expertise.

The content is good — independent, multi-perspective, actually useful. People trust it because it feels earned. And in most cases, it was earned.

These people weren't faking it at the start. That's the part everyone misses.

The trust was real. The credentials were real. The insight was real. This stage can last years, and it's the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Then comes the monetization.

The platform grows. First it's ads and sponsorships — reasonable enough, content costs money to produce.

Then it's live events. Ticketed summits that cost thousands. Premium products. Maybe a tequila brand.

Maybe financial vehicles — SPACs, tokens, funds — where the audience bears the risk and the creator collects fees regardless of outcome.

Each step is small. Each step makes sense at the time. But somewhere in the middle, the relationship flips.

It stops being "I share what I know" and starts being "you are my customer base."

The takes that drive ticket sales get emphasized. The analysis that aligns with the portfolio gets more airtime. The contrarian stance that built the whole thing becomes a brand to be protected rather than a genuine intellectual position.

Then comes the power conversion.

The platform's influence becomes political capital. Advisory roles. Government positions. Fundraisers.

The audience that was built on "independent thinking" now provides cover for decisions that directly benefit the creator's portfolio.

One person goes from hosting a tech podcast to literally writing AI policy while holding 449 investments in AI companies.

Another makes $750 million from financial vehicles while the retail investors who trusted his media persona absorb losses they'll never recover from.

The content keeps flowing. The podcast keeps publishing. The takes keep coming.

But the audience is no longer receiving insight. They're receiving narrative management. They think they're the customer. They're the product.

The Engine

Here's the part that genuinely disturbs me about this whole thing: it still works.

The playbook is completely legible now. The three stages are documented, researched, written about. The financial losses are public record. The conflicts of interest have been investigated by five-reporter teams at major newspapers. Government ethics experts have used words like "graft" and "sham."

Everyone can see it. And it still works.

Not because the information is hidden. Because the machine always has a fresh cohort of people who haven't pattern-matched yet. There's always someone new — someone who sees the confident take, the impressive resume, the large following, and thinks "this person must know something I don't." That's the engine. It doesn't need to hide. It just needs new fuel.

But here's what's actually changing: the fuel is running out.

The Antibodies

The same way people learned to pattern-match MLM pitches in the 2010s — the "hey girl" DMs, the income claims, the conference photos — they're learning to pattern-match the trust-to-extraction pipeline.

The tells are becoming obvious to a growing number of people. Confident predictions that always align with the portfolio. Lifestyle signaling disguised as aspiration that's actually a sales funnel.

Takes that conveniently shift in whatever direction maintains political access. Products that extract from the audience — $1,200 tequila bottles, $21 million summits, financial vehicles with 30% sponsor fees — packaged as "community" or "access." The "independent thinker" brand providing cover for institutional interests.

Once the pattern clicks in someone's head, it's permanent.

That Reddit commenter didn't evaluate the take and decide it was wrong. They saw the face and the processing stopped.

That's not analysis — that's immune response. And immune responses don't care about rebrandings or comeback tours.

The people who've been through this cycle — who invested real money based on these recommendations, who watched their portfolio crater while the person who told them to buy doubled his own position — they're not going back.

Ever. And they're not quiet about it. These aren't fringe people living in conspiracy forums. The Reddit thread was mainstream tech.

The polling is from Edelman, PPP, Howdy.com. The antibodies are spreading through the general population, not just the terminally online.

The Trap Nobody Sees

There's a dynamic underneath all of this that makes it even more interesting.

When the original audience starts leaving, they don't leave loudly.

They don't write angry reviews or post breakup letters. They just stop listening.

One researcher pointed out that a major tech podcast still had a 4.2 rating on Apple Podcasts with only 350 reviews — because the early listeners who gave it high ratings had quietly disappeared, and the new audience that replaced them hadn't reviewed yet.

And what fills that vacuum is a fundamentally different kind of listener.

Less discerning. More tribal. More interested in having their existing beliefs confirmed than in genuine analysis. The commercial metrics look fine — downloads might even go up, the summit sells out, the merch moves — but a demographic transformation has happened underneath those numbers that changes everything.

The smart money, the operators, the people who made the platform credible in the first place? Gone. What remains is an audience that's less likely to notice the extraction and more likely to evangelize the brand.

This is how you get a podcast that's commercially thriving and reputationally dead at the same time. The numbers say one thing. The Reddit thread says another. Both are true. And the person at the center often can't tell the difference because the only metric they watch is the one that's still going up.

What Happens Next

The trust collapse isn't about a few bad actors who got caught. It's structural.

The incentive design of media — all media, not just tech — rewards extraction.

The person giving you confident, tribal, emotionally satisfying certainty will always get more engagement than the person saying "it's complicated."

The algorithm doesn't optimize for truth. It optimizes for attention. And extraction is more attention-efficient than integrity.

But the antibodies are spreading. And once they spread far enough, the market flips. Here's what I think that looks like.

The extraction economy doesn't collapse. It hollows out.

The summits will still sell out. The tequila will still move units. The downloads will stay high.

But the composition of who's buying changes completely. The audience that made these platforms credible — the operators, the builders, the people with real capital and real judgment — will be gone.

What's left is a fanbase, not a following. Commercially viable, strategically worthless. You can sell them tickets but you can't leverage them into anything real.

The extractors will look successful right up until they need the room to take them seriously, and the room won't.

Trust becomes the scarcest asset in public life.

The scarcity used to be information — AI killed that. Then it was access — the internet killed that. What's left is trust. Real, verifiable, skin-in-the-game trust.

The default assumption when someone sees a tech personality online is already shifting from "what does this person know" to "what are they selling me."

That used to be reserved for obviously promotional content. Now it's the baseline. Anyone who can demonstrate — not claim, demonstrate — that they're operating cleanly will have a structural advantage that compounds for decades.

Not because they're more talented. Because there are so few of them.

The "independent thinker" brand becomes toxic.

This one's counterintuitive, but watch for it. The label that used to signal credibility — "I'm not beholden to anyone, I call it like I see it" — is getting pattern-matched as the opening move of the extraction playbook.

The audience has seen too many "independent thinkers" end up on government advisory boards while holding nine-figure portfolios in the sectors they're advising on.

The word independent is going to carry the same energy as "disruptor" did by 2020 — a tell that someone is about to sell you something.

The people who win will be boring.

Not boring content — boring incentive structures.

Transparent revenue. Obvious alignment between what they say and how they make money. No side doors. No financial vehicles. No tequila brands.

The next generation of trusted voices won't be the most charismatic or the most confident. They'll be the ones where you can look at their entire operation and understand exactly how they eat. That's it. That's the whole competitive advantage.

And here's the thing about trust that the extractors missed: losing it is permanent in a way that losing money never is.

Going broke is temporary.

Founders recover from it all the time — lose everything, rebuild, come back stronger. That's one of the most respected narratives in business.

But becoming someone nobody trusts? There's no comeback tour when the internet has every receipt.

The pattern-match is limbic, not cognitive. You don't get a second first impression with an entire generation.

The extractors got rich. They also became people that nobody honest wants to be around — and that's worse than any financial loss, because you can rebuild from zero but you can't rebuild from a reputation that triggers the antibody response the moment your face appears on screen.

The Question

The question for 2026 isn't "who do I trust?" That framing still puts the burden on you to evaluate correctly — and the whole point of the antibody response is that people are done evaluating. Done giving the benefit of the doubt. The processing has stopped.

The better question — whether you're building something, investing in something, or just deciding who's worth an hour of your attention — is simpler:

Can I see how this person makes money? And does it require me to lose?

If you can't answer both halves clearly, the antibodies have already made the decision for you. You just haven't noticed yet.