Trust—Burned In
If I had to pick one aspect of myself that I shared with my fellow humans, it would be my pure hatred of social media platforms. I know you hate them too. We all do.
I feel it’s important to preface this: this is not a rant but a way to show you what I think is a priority in making a brand. Not brand-as-in-selling but brand-as-in-trust. They are essentially the same. But the uninitiated reject the former and utilize the latter everyday. Business is just a small subsection of this topic, and I think since I first saw it I couldn’t unsee it.
We all know social media platforms are a modern disease, but like good little sheep we use them anyway, doing the bidding of our overlords. My friend Kenny Kane told me years ago he thought socials were the new smoking. I laughed at him, “what kind of adult is fearful of a little screen time” I thought to myself. Now when I look down at my screen I might as well cough. The symptoms of a disease are starting to manifest. We wake up, we check the feed, we make the content, we feed the machine. We all laugh at the absurdity of trend slop, we bemoan the wet blanket of influence and control, but we also keep scrolling despite our disgust.
We have been conscripted into building trillion-dollar companies with our experience, our art, and our voice. We attract a following, and then the platform decides how much of that following we're allowed to speak to. We are all essentially shittier, unpaid versions of reality TV stars.
You spent ten years honing a skill and another ten using that skin to earn an audience. But a platform uses your material and your audiences’ interest to then make you purchase their interest from them. Statistically each post will only ever be seen by less than 10% of your organic audience. To speak to all of them, you need to buy ads or promote your posts. Not to mention that with one quick meeting at Meta or TikTok, a shift in the algorithm can annihilate whatever momentum you had. So yes, the use of social media should come with a surgeon general’s warning.
Addictive nature aside, think about the profiteering that is going on, just consider the arrangement honestly. You produce the work. You supply the credibility. You bring the audience. In exchange, you get reach — rented, revocable, and repriced whenever quarterly earnings demand it. Any other industry would call this sharecropping. We call it a "creator economy."
This is not how you build a brand.
A brand is trust. That's the whole definition. Not trust as a warm sentiment, but trust as a mechanical, measurable phenomenon: the ability of a name or mark to cause predictable behavior.
You trust a person when their past behavior lets you predict their future behavior. You trust a bridge because it held yesterday and the day before and every day since it was built. Trust is not a feeling someone decides to extend to you. It is a prediction their brain makes automatically, based on the record you've written. Every reliable prediction strengthens the model. Every violated prediction damages it. And the model runs before conscious thought — you don't deliberate about whether to trust the bridge, you just drive across it.
A name is nothing but a container for that predictive model. When someone sees your name — on a product, in an inbox, on a gym door — their mind produces a forecast: this is what happens next. That forecast is your brand. There is no “good” or “bad” branding, it is simply the behavior upon recognizing your mark. What we consider good is simply steered in our favor, see names like MAGA, Apple, and Christ. What we consider bad is just unintended reactions, Jaguar, Budlight, and Peter Attia don’t even need to be explained.
The word itself confesses this. Brand comes from the Old Norse brandr — to burn. A mark seared into a hide so an animal could be identified at a distance, without inspection. The whole technology of the brand, from the beginning, was prediction at a distance: see the mark, know what you're dealing with, before you get close enough to check.
And the history is more straight forward than the business books admit. Medieval guilds didn't invent maker's marks as a promotional tool. They required them — so that when a sword shattered or a loaf of bread came up short, the failure could be traced to its maker and punished. The mark was accountability. Trust was the byproduct. A craftsman who put his mark on good work, year after year, decade after decade, accumulated something: a name that predicted quality so reliably it commanded a premium before the buyer ever touched the goods. He didn't build trust by claiming it. He built it by being predictable, in public, with consequences, for a long time.
The evidence for this is empirical. Byron Sharp's research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — decades of purchase data across categories — found that brands grow through what he calls mental availability: being instantly retrieved from memory at the moment of decision. And mental availability is built exactly one way: repeated, coherent exposure to the same name, the same voice, the same meaning. Binet and Field analyzed hundreds of real campaigns and found the same split everywhere they looked — short-term activation spikes and decays within weeks, while consistent communication compounds year over year, quietly making everything else easier. The compounding is the entire prize. And compounding has one non-negotiable requirement: it cannot be interrupted.
Case in point: Coca Cola.
David Ogilvy said it in 1955 and it has never stopped being true: every communication is either a deposit into the brand's account or a withdrawal from it. There is no neutral post or action. Every time your name appears and delivers what the forecast predicted, the model strengthens. Every time it appears attached to something rushed, off-key, desperate, or borrowed from a trend, the forecast degrades — and with it, the premium, the loyalty, the ability to be chosen without deliberation. You are training a predictive model with everything you publish. The only question is what you're training it to predict.
Which brings us back to the platforms, because now the problem is precise.
Established brands can use social media as a lever because they have legacy and presence. The name, Gucci has cultural context whether you know their start was in fine leather goods more than 100 years ago or not. The name gives you a feeling because it has become bigger than itself. Starting on social media however, is one of the worst ways to build predictability. Unless you have the capital to pay the oligarchs to grant it to you. But this is a thin veil for real branding. Because you can’t purchase trust.
If a brand is a prediction, then building one requires exactly three things: consistency in what you say, an audience that actually receives it, and time for the repetitions to accumulate. Social platforms takes all three away from you.
Consistency: the algorithm rewards novelty, trend-conformity, homogenization, and whatever format the platform is pushing this quarter. The same-voice, same-meaning repetition that builds a predictive model is precisely what the machine deprioritizes. You are structurally incentivized to be unpredictable — to shapeshift weekly — which is to say, incentivized to prevent your own brand from forming.
Reception: the platform decides who hears you. Your deposits reach a fraction of your own audience unless you pay to reach the rest. The record you're writing is being read with most of the pages torn out, and the missing pages are sold back to you at rates that get repriced every earnings call.
Time: one algorithm shift and the accumulation resets. Ask the publishers who rebuilt entire newsrooms around Facebook video on Facebook's word, then watched the reach evaporate when the algorithm turned. Years of audience relationship, repriced to zero in a meeting they weren't invited to. The following you built on a platform is a number the platform displays to you. It is not an asset you hold.
If trust is prediction, and prediction is built through consistent communication received over time, then the single most important act of brand-building is securing a channel where all three are under your control. Where a deposit is guaranteed to reach the account. Where you set the cadence, the voice holds, and no third party stands between your name and the model it's training.
That channel exists. It's the email list, the site, the thing you publish on your own terms — unglamorous, unfashionable, and entirely yours. Not because email is magic, but because it's the only land you farm where you also keep the harvest.
I am prioritizing the email newsletter and making it predictably valuable because I want to earn trust. I want someone to see the name in their inbox and have them open it, not because they thought about it but because they have had so many previous positive experiences doing so.
So this means a few things. This email is not a selling channel (in the traditional sense). I have something to sell certainly, but if you’ve been here a while, you already know about it. I will inform you of when I make things, but what it is more geared towards, is telling you how making these things changed me, what lessons I derived from creating them, and what I think others can learn from my experience.
The next difference: I am not talking AT you. If you have ever responded to one of my emails, you know that I read and write back. Please keep this up, even if it's short. It makes a difference — and not just to me. A reply is the strongest signal you can send your email provider that this is a correspondence, not a broadcast.
Which brings up the last middleman I can't remove for you: the junk folder. Your inbox has an algorithm too, and by default it treats an unfamiliar name as noise until proven otherwise.
Prove it otherwise — it takes thirty seconds.
In Gmail, drag this email into your Primary tab and say yes when it asks to keep doing that.
On Apple Mail, tap my name at the top and "Add to Contacts." In Outlook, right-click → Junk → Never Block Sender.
Or skip all of it and just reply.
Do that and the prediction machine works the way it's supposed to: the name shows up, you know exactly what follows, and no algorithm gets a vote.
In the next few weeks I'll be making videos and articles on the topic of brand building. Mostly because I'm fascinated by the psychology of it all, but also because I know a lot of you out there own businesses or care about your reputation.
Like always, if this email is not useful, unsubscribe is below.
If it is, please share with others.
