Why Gen Z Trusts Creators More Than Institutions - Episode 40

Why does Gen Z trust TikTok creators more than the CDC, the media, or even their own universities? In this episode, Reagan Faulkner breaks down the data on collapsing institutional trust and why younger voters now get their news, political cues, and even health advice from influencers instead of “official” experts. We walk through the economic chaos, COVID fallout, and cultural disconnect that trained a whole generation to value authenticity over credentials and personality over party labels. And we talk about what that means for campaigns, conservative movements, and anyone who actually wants to rebuild real authority instead of ceding the future to poser influencers.

What you’ll learn / Key moments

• 00:00 – Why the show format is changing for summer and why this episode sets the tone for a deeper, framework‑driven look at politics, media, and institutions.
• 03:50 – Pew and Gallup numbers on where 18–29‑year‑olds actually get their news and how far trust in legacy media has collapsed across age groups.
• 09:45 – How student debt, a broken college ROI, and a shaky job market trained Gen Z to see universities and “the system” as a scam.
• 16:30 – COVID lockdowns, Zoom school, and social anxiety: how 2020–2022 rewired a generation’s relationship with authority, community, and basic social skills.
• 23:10 – Why creators feel more human than institutions, how parasocial trust works, and why influencers beat polished press conferences every time.
• 29:30 – The new “doctor shopping” by ideology and why more young Americans now trust peers and social media over healthcare professionals.
• 36:20 – From Trump’s 2016 run to Spencer Pratt’s trailer videos: how outsider personalities rewrote the rules of political credibility.
• 44:10 – Identity‑first, tribe‑driven politics: small online communities, fandoms, and issue tribes replacing broad party loyalty.
• 52:00 – Why traditional campaign ads are dead content, and what actually moves younger voters: IRL clips, sarcasm, and low‑key, behind‑the‑scenes moments.
• 59:00 – What serious conservatives need to do now: community before messaging, authenticity before polish, and why qualified leaders must learn creator‑style communication or keep losing ground.

Call to action

If you care about where Gen Z is getting its news and who is shaping the next decade of American politics, this is the moment to plug in—not sit back. Make sure you’re following The Reagan Faulkner Show on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Substack so you don’t miss the deeper dives coming all summer long. Stay connected locally by following The Wilmington Standard on Instagram and Facebook as we track how these national shifts play out in real communities. 

And when you grab your next bag of coffee, support a company that actually puts its money where its mouth is: Seven Weeks Coffee—use code REAGAN2026 at checkout so 10% goes straight to crisis pregnancy centers that are serving moms and protecting life in the real world. Let’s stop outsourcing the future of our institutions to unqualified influencers and start building a movement that’s both emotionally resonant and morally serious.

Transcript

0:07

What's up guys, and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. I am so sorry for the lack of content recently. Finals have been, well not have been, they were insane. They were crazy, they were very, very unpleasant, but we are done with finals, then I was traveling, going to events, and working on some really exciting projects behind the scenes, but we are so back now, over the summer we're going to be switching to a slightly different form. We're going to be doing one episode a week, more in depth, more thoughtful, maybe a little bit longer, and we're going to be providing more of like a framework driven conversation about politics, media, and the future of institutions in America. Something that I really want to look towards is instead of recapping the 24 hour media cycle and chasing headlines and looking at the symptoms of what's happening in our country, I think it would be really interesting to shift over the summer a little bit, but I have more time for research and to read books and look at why those symptoms are happening, why those manifestations are happening, what is the actual disease, so you can say, behind the symptoms that are appearing in the 24 hour news cycle. So we are going to be jumping into that. You will be seeing one essay from me every week in Substack and a lot more content on my socials, so stay tuned because I am so excited to bring you all of this and more over the summer, and honestly, I think today's topic kind of perfectly captures where we are heading as a society, where we are heading specifically politically in America. So today we're going to be talking about why Gen Z and Gen Alpha distrust institutions more than any previous generation and why creators and influencers are increasingly feeling more trustworthy than kind of your traditional organizations, traditional institutions, and what this means for the future of politics, leadership, and society itself. So let's jump right into it. Now, to really understand where we are now, we first need to understand the literal scale of this institutional distrust that's happening among younger Americans, and we are going to dive into some research and some statistics to understand this scale. So according to Pew Research, nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 29 now get their news primarily from social media rather than traditional media organizations. Newspapers or like MSNBC, Fox News, those would be your traditional media, even like FoxNews.com or MSN.com. Instead of those places, my generation, Gen Alpha, little bit of millennials, but more Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are getting their news from literally social media, social media influencers, meme accounts, things like that. Among the right specifically, about 49% of Americans primarily get their news from social media. We're going to compare this to the left, where that number is about 51%. So young 18 to 29 Americans on the right and the left are about equal in where they are consuming their news and getting their updates and their headlines. And we can compare that to Americans over 65, where only around a quarter rely primarily on social media for news consumption. As you can imagine, it's kind of like a reverse bar graph where the bar goes out really far for 18 to 29 and then a little bit shorter for the next and a little bit shorter and then really short for 65 and plus. So there is a gradual decrease in age groups consuming their news primarily through social media, with the most being Gen Z, 18 to 29, the least being 65 and plus, and then gradually scaling back in the age groups in the middle. Now, this is not just a technological shift. We can't just say, oh, well, obviously, granny doesn't know how to use social media. So of course, she's not going to get her news through social media. That is not the main issue that we're seeing here. What we are seeing is a literal psychological and cultural shift, because historically, we all know that institutions controlled information, whether it be newspapers, television networks, universities, political parties, or even government agencies. Now, information is utterly and completely decentralized. According to Pew Research, roughly 46.2 million voting age Americans now regularly get their news from social media influencers and online personalities. 46.2 million voting age Americans. That is an enormous societal change. And when you think about everything that that changes, like it is massive that you have to think about that from the perspective of that changes campaigns, that changes how news organizations, if they want to remain alive as Gen Z grows into older adults, they need to completely shift how they get information to their audiences. That completely changes how lifelong institutions, things like the Department of Education or the CDC or the WHO, how they kind of get to Gen Z and Gen Alpha because Gen Z and Gen Alpha are getting all of this news, all of this information from social media influencers, not these centralized agencies or decentralized institutions. So at the same time, we look at Gallup polling and what Gallup is showing is that trusted media has reached historic lows. Americans increasingly believe that journalists are biased, disconnected or driven by agendas rather than public trust. And this is the lowest for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that 18 to 29 age group. But it's pretty low for all age groups across the board. And it is highest with 65 and up. So we see an inverse of the chart where 65 and up believes the most in media. They trust media, legacy media the most. And then we see a gradual decline all the way to the lowest point at Gen Z, Gen Alpha. This trust or this distrust does not stop with media. Young Americans increasingly distrust the government, universities, corporations, health institutions and traditional political organizations, which could be the GOP or the Democratic Party or things like that. The traditional political organizations that have found the two party system for the last, what, 50, 60, 70, 80 years. I mean, quite frankly, we've had a two party system for last basically 250 years. But we had a little bit of a populist movement in the 1920s. I mean, that that did happen. So like last 80 years, I would say. According to Gallup, younger generations report dramatically lower trust in these major institutions compared to lower generations, which I just said, think about that graph that I explained, the reverse step graph, but put 65 and up at the top and then put 18 to 29 at the bottom. And you can see how the distrust has decreased or how the distrust has increased. Trust decreases per age block. Now, really, what we need to analyze is we can understand, yeah, Gen Z distrust institutions. We know that Gen Alpha distrust institutions. We know that. But why like why is this happening? Why does this youngest age group in America are newly coming into being able to vote? Voters are voters that have voted once or twice. Why do they distrust institutions so much? Why do younger generations feel emotionally disconnected from institutions that previous generations like, quite frankly, relied on and felt very tied to? Look at the GOP in the 1980s, and that was the Ronald Reagan GOP, where our parents, I guess that would be Gen X, felt very tied to that GOP. They might have even been too young, but they felt very tied. Baby boomers felt very tied to that GOP. And we see now young people not really drifting in that direction. They may be Republicans, but they don't really want to participate in the institution that is political parties. Like, why is that? Part of the answer is economic instability. Student loan debt in America has now reached approximately $1.833 trillion. Federal student loan debt alone accounts for $1.693 trillion, with the rest of that being private student loan debt, not federal student loan debt. Federal student loan debt is impacting over 42 million borrowers, guys. We did an entire episode about everything that's going on in the college scam, kind of your ROI on college, how it's not as good as it used to be, how it's better to go blue card. We did a whole episode on that about a month ago. So if you really want to understand why you don't trust the institutions related to the university collegiate system, go check that out. We're not going to dive super into it, but just know those numbers, because there is so much debt. And at the same time, many college graduates are entering one of the most unstable entry level job markets in years. It has not been this unstable for recent graduates since 2013, right after the recession. Recent reporting from Forbes highlighted how many graduates are struggling with underemployment, rising living costs, and uncertainty about whether higher education is actually delivering the future they were promised. Not to mention you compound that with the fact that the average homebuyer, I think, is like 45 or 50 years old now. So young people aren't getting what they promised. They were told if you go to college, if you do your four years, if you get your diploma, and especially if you get a graduate degree, you are going to have a white picket fence. You're going to have a great job. You're going to get married with 2.5 kids. You're going to have a dog. And it's going to be great. And what we're seeing is that that's not happening. A lot of people are still living with their parents or they're living in, you know, just like gross, small apartments. And these aren't people that just got women and gender studies degrees. Like those people, quite frankly, they completely deserve not having a job. If you get a stupid degree, you deserve to be unemployed. That is 100% your own fault. But we are literally talking about business majors and different groups of people that should be getting jobs. A lot of my friends that graduated this semester can't get a job and they have degrees in finance and business and accounting and things that are actually useful and should be needed. But like I said, the recent graduate job market is the lowest that it has been since 2013. So people are coming out with all this student loan debt and then they can't pay it back because they can't get a job. And it's just insane. It makes you not trust institutions. Not to mention the fact that personally, from my experience in college, we are being taught information that is at least a decade old. AI is coming in, various other forms of automation are coming in. People are using different softwares. I'm an accounting major. So when different accounting firms come in and talk to us during Beta Alpha Psi, which is kind of like our accounting club, they're talking about all their automation, all their software, all their analytics, all their AI. And I'm still learning how to do things by hand or like the most archaic way possible on Excel from probably something that Bill Gates was doing back in the 1990s. And that is not how things are done anymore. So when you're applying for a job or again, because I'm an accounting major, this is the best example I have when you're an associate at an accounting firm. You don't even understand what your company is doing because your school didn't teach you. They taught you how it was done 10 or 20 years ago. The curriculum is not updating. So the cost of college goes up every year and the amount of people that go to college goes up every year. But your level of actual education and its applicability to everyday life when you get a job in the industry that you're studying in does not translate at all because you're learning how to do things the way they were doing in 2000 or 2004, not 2026. So you also have an entire generation that experienced COVID lockdown, social isolation, online schooling, economic instability and massive digital immersion all throughout 2020, 2021 and a little bit of 2022. Edelman research has shown that COVID had enormous psychological and social effects on Gen Z, increasing anxiety, uncertainty, distrust and feelings of disconnection, which could also partly explain why Gen Z has such a hard time getting hired. If you have crippling social anxiety and you can't make eye contact, then chances are you're not going to interview well. And that all goes back to COVID. It doesn't go back to Gen Z being digitally native or not being like raised right or having iPads in classrooms, although the iPads in classrooms is showing statistically to not be a good thing. But COVID lockdowns, doing class on Zoom, not having to turn your camera on, not having to participate, all of that just stripped away the formative years that we had learning how to be social, engage with our teachers, engage with our friends, you know, basic everyday life stuff that our parents and grandparents didn't even think about was like developmental until they saw us not go through those formative years and formative phases. And many young people increasingly feel that institutions are performative rather than authentic. Think press conferences instead of live streams. Whether it's universities, media organizations, corporations or politics, younger generations often feel like they are being marketed to rather than genuinely understood. So research shows that more Gen Z and millennials are actually trusting their peers and social media more than doctors and healthcare professionals, which is extremely concerning. I'm not a fan of the healthcare industry at all, but I also don't think that we should be trusting this random TikTok influencer over like a legitimate trusted healthcare professional. Nine times out of ten, sometimes you're getting some really cool holistic stuff on TikTok, but nine times out of ten, we probably need to trust our doctors over some random human on TikTok. So the same studies are showing that the same age group is more likely to choose a doctor or healthcare provider based on political alignment or to leave a doctor or healthcare provider because of a political disagreement. So think about that. People are literally leaving their healthcare providers because they might have a different view about abortion or they might have a different view about the COVID vaccine. And this is on both sides. And I can testify that it would be true. If I had a doctor that tried to force me to get the COVID vaccine, I would definitely not go see that doctor anymore. But on the left, you're having people leave their healthcare providers because their healthcare provider might be pro-life or they might be against the abortion pill or they might not prescribe a certain medication or believe that this person has mental health issues or whatever. They might not have the same belief or views on mental health that somebody else does. So this is just causing people to pick their doctors like they pick their toothpaste at Target, which we have never seen before. That is not how it used to be. I mean, I know my parents talked about how they kind of had a doctor and that doctor stayed their doctor for 20 or 30 years or their entire childhood. They were not doctor shopping, which I think is really, really crazy that we're doctor shopping literally because of political differences. We try to talk about reducing the political divide. But one of the most what should be one of the most nonpartisan professions has become one of the most partisan professions, and that is health care. Like I said a minute ago, the massive amount of student debt in this country paired with the number of Americans that either can't find a job or are overqualified for the job that they have is completely shocking. We were told and I mean, my generation was told that if we went to college, we would make a living wage. But now there's a shortage of blue collar workers and the plumber down the road is making six digits while Gen Z can barely afford to pay rent for the apartment where they're literally useful diplomas just hanging on the wall. They got their diploma. They can barely pay rent. And the plumber or the HVAC technician is making six digits down the street because there aren't enough people in his industry to do the blue collar work that's needed. Media organizations have lost an insane amount of trust because they use the same headlines and cross pollinate all of these stories, whether they never actually share anything meaningful. I mean, they divide. They share fake news. They report on false headlines. They have to correct themselves because they move too fast and they misreport whatever is happening at that exact moment. And then they just raise their audiences or produce clickbait content that leaves you feeling like you didn't actually get what you clicked on and not trusting that journalist or that media organization anymore because you feel like you were clickbaited into the article. This never actually did any actually in-depth analysis from our legacy media. And this is where creators enter the picture, because while institutions often feel scripted and impersonal, creators feel human. And this gap is currently being exploited by literally anybody who is online and understands human psychology or those with a story to tell and those who understand how to market themselves and their ideas better than legacy media and long-term media institutions. Creators speak casually. They show their personality. They share emotions. They communicate directly and they interact with audiences daily. That creates parasocial trust. No press conferences, no pre-approved questions, no visible scripts, no boundaries or rules or gatekeeping. It is literally just you and that creator as you scroll through your phone. There's no barriers in between you and that person besides your screen. It feels like this one-on-one connection. They break things down and it feels like they're talking directly to you, that they made the content explicitly for you or that they're trying to share a certain story so that they can help other people. And whether people realize it or not, modern trust is increasingly emotional before it is informational. Before somebody can share any information, break down like why XYZ is happening or do almost like an explainer video on TikTok, that person needs to have derived some form of trust from their audience, whether it's in their hook or whether it's in a story that they shared that blew up and then they can kind of use that audience to explain and become a so-called expert in their field. People trust personalities because personalities feel accessible. Again, you pick up your phone and there they are. You don't have to wait for the six o'clock news to see Bret Baier. Bret Baier is already in your phone, but because of the establishment and institutions, there's actually studies and statistics that show that even legacy media hosts who get on TikTok or get on social media, they're still not as trusted as random influencers and personalities that came out of nowhere and that don't have a history in institutions or media, which is super, super interesting, but completely aside from what we were talking about a little bit. Now, whether you agree with this or not, the fact is that institutions, candidates and elected officials have to make Gen Z and Gen Alpha know and trust them before they start information dumping, before they start sharing their messaging, before they start sharing their plans for what they'll do when they get elected. They have to make Gen Z and Gen Alpha feel something and feel connected before they can do this or else Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren't going to listen. I've seen it myself with some of my friends. Until they can trust a candidate or an institution, they feel nothing, even if the ideas are good, they're not going to listen to them. They need to know why to make sure that they're not getting played or getting conned or that somebody is lying to them. Once we as a generation know and understand what moved a person to run for office or why an institution exists or who is behind running that institution, if we like them, which if they're authentic and honest, we're probably going to like them, then we're willing to listen to their ideas and invest in their story and help them out or engage in that institution or work with that candidate. Young people often feel more connected to podcasters, YouTubers, TikTok creators, streamers and online communities than they do to legacy institutions. Look at the insane growth of Blue Sky, which is predominantly used by the left. This is where small intimate communities and fandoms exist. It's kind of like if X and I guess Reddit have a baby from my understanding. It's very intimate, very close knit networks of like-minded communities and like-minded fandoms where basically the user can like charade your algorithm from my understanding of it. Now, I am not on Blue Sky. I'm still trying to understand it. So if I'm wrong, I would love for somebody to comment or let me know. But that is my current understanding of it is that it's very intimate and close knit compared to X or Instagram, where there's just information flying from everywhere that could be your algorithm or could be being tested by the algorithm. You never really know. It could be people you follow. It could be people you don't follow. You never really know. Look at the rise of sub-stat popularity, where Americans can actually follow their favorite content creators and favorite writers without the hold of legacy media on those so-called journalists or freelancers. Look at the perfect case study, which would be Trump's 2016 run, where he defied all odds because he was a political outsider and former reality TV star. Now, a lot of people said like, oh, he won in spite of that. Now, I argue that he won because of that. Like, people knew him from The Apprentice. They knew him from Pizza Hut and McDonald's commercials. They knew him from Oprah and SNL skits. They knew him even from, like, Home Alone. But they didn't know him from the halls of Congress. They didn't know him from years after years after years of decision desk decisions. They knew him from, like, things that they trusted, like TV shows. Back when cable was a thing, they trusted him because he always seemed real and legitimate on reality TV and things like that. He wasn't scripted. He wasn't this prim and polished, suit and tie political figure. They kind of saw Trump in all the different ways and on the tabloids. And honestly, politics has fundamentally changed because of this. It was all inevitable because of the rapid, like, shift in technology. But Trump's personality and political interests, paired with COVID, paired with the rapid rise of technological dependence and growth of online communities because of COVID, all fast track these changes to where we are now. Politics is no longer institution first like it has been for literally, like, all of history. It's increasingly identity first and personality first, which means it is becoming increasingly tribalistic. This is something we were actually edging away from. We saw a lot less, like, identification with certain political parties or certain communities or voting issues based on identity until we saw the rise of these intimate communities and small groups and fandoms and things like that on the internet where disconnected, like I said, intimate communities, disconnected fandoms are all competing ideologies and one issue voters. So you have different tribes. You have your pro-whifers versus your pro-choicers. You have your pro-two-way versus your anti-two-way. You have Latinas for Trump, Blacks for Trump, like, all the different Asians for Trump, like, all the different identity segments for identity segments within the Republican Party or people that are voting for Trump. Then you have women's groups for Republicans and men's groups for Republicans. Like, you have all these different groups, which, yes, they have historically existed. I know I'm in the lower case, the Republican women's group, and, like, that group has been around for a long time. That's not because of the internet. But now you have, like, subgroups within each of these groups all over the internet, all over Discord, all over Reddit, and that is where conversations are happening. They're very private conversations that candidates aren't privy to because people want it to be like a friend group. They want it to be a tight-knit community where they feel like they can trust people and communicate openly and honestly. This shift has enormous implications for politics. Political influence is becoming decentralized. So no longer can a candidate rely on mailers or TV ads and a good message paired with a solid law degree. That is not going to win the masses anymore. Campaigns increasingly are going to rely on podcasts, viral clips, influencers, digital communities, and creator ecosystems rather than just traditional media appearances or institutional endorsements like we have seen historically and in the past. Let's face it. Politics will literally never be the same after Trump went on Joe Rogan and Theovon. It will never be the same after Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy. First of all, you can really see the split in ideology from those podcasts of what Trump went on versus what Kamala went on. And as a part of this new culture, it's not just about the opportunities that you take. It's about the opportunities that you reject. Look at how Kamala had the opportunity to go on the Joe Rogan experience, but she turned it down. What do you think that did for her polls? Because I would argue her not going slightly right with Joe Rogan and really honing in and digging her feet into Call Her Daddy and not going on these other shows that are more conservative or where more men watch it. I think that that was something that really cost her a lot of points on Election Day. Younger voters increasingly evaluate politicians through authenticity, relatability, cultural fluency, online and online presence rather than simply party affiliation. Now, a great example of this is Spencer Pratt. He is running as an independent, which I was really surprised by. I was assuming he was running as a Republican, but he is running as an independent. But he has almost all the votes of the conservative base, and he's getting a lot of votes from the liberal base. It doesn't matter about party affiliation anymore because the content and the message that he is putting out is absolutely stellar. I mean, he is a former reality TV star, so he's already exposed himself, the good, the bad, the ugly, regardless of how you actually feel about reality TV and whether or not it's actually real. Pratt has already demonstrated relatability and cultural fluency from his time on the big screen, and now he's translating that into viral content that connects and emotionally resonates with voters across all age spectrums. Everybody can feel for Spencer Pratt. He lost his house. He's living in an Airstream trailer, especially the one where the dad fell into a coma and woke up and it was like, the mayor fixed it. The mayor fixed it. That's something that can emotionally resonate with all voters. You have a mom, you have a dad that fell into the coma, you have the two kids. That can resonate with every single one of those age groups. I also think that traditional political organizations, especially conservative organizations, and also very much some super institutional liberal organizations still communicate like it's 2008. I may have been four years old, but I've got a really good memory, and I remember a good chunk of the 2008 election. I also remember a really good chunk of the 2012 election. I remember getting my Romney Ryan t-shirt. I remember the yard signs. I remember a lot of my parents watching Fox News every night, and I would sit there and watch it and wonder what's going on. I remember a lot of that, and in the grand scheme of things, I haven't seen much of a change in political messaging, aside from one-offers like Trump, like Spencer Pratt, and like James Fishback. Younger audiences do not want to feel lectured at, which is what a lot of these institutions and politicians do. They lecture, and they explain, and they break down, but younger audiences want to emotionally connect with you, and those discussions, rather than feel like lectures, we want them to feel like conversations. We want them to feel like community. We want them to feel like mutual understanding, rather than a subordinate to a higher-up lecturing at us and explaining things to us. We want community, conversation, identity, purpose, and authenticity. Now, for example, with UNCW College Republicans, one thing that our executive board has been doing really well is, instead of doing lecture nights or series or whatever like that, we found that nobody really showed up, but what we do now is we have community events. We have pizza nights and movie nights, where we might watch an educational movie, or a candidate or a member from the community might come in and hang out with us, and we have those educational conversations, and we learn and we engage, but it's not us sitting in a chair while somebody's up at the front or behind a podium lecturing at us. It is mutual. It is on equal footing, and we can have an intellectual conversation back and forth, so that's been really interesting to watch, and it's been really interesting to watch other, I guess, organizations on campus, not necessarily political, struggle to find their footing because Gen Z and Gen Alpha engagement is just different. That's why creators are becoming more politically powerful. Because creators understand internet native communications and white institutions don't. Because creators offer those comment sections. They offer live streams. They offer to go live with other people. They bring other people onto their podcast to have that one-on-one discussion. They don't lecture. They relate. Instead of lecturing, they relate, and they communicate, and they're accessible. So think about campaign ads, for example. Nobody wants to watch a campaign ad, whether it be on YouTube or PayPal, unless there is 1% of you out there. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that nobody genuinely wants to watch a campaign ad. Nobody likes those cheesy, handshaking, smiling campaign ads with the big three issues where you know it's all staged and it all has that certain filter on it. I just don't think anybody actually likes those. And on the flip side, nobody likes the muddling ads where the political opponents get shown in black and white mugshots with the big red letters and the deep voice explaining what they've done wrong. Nobody likes those either. I fundamentally don't believe that anybody actually enjoys watching campaign ads. So what do people like? Because now you can skip on YouTube 9 times out of 10. You don't have to have cable. YouTube TV offers the opportunity to skip this ad and go to a different ad or have the mindfulness where you're watching the waterfall. You don't really have to watch campaign ads anymore. So what do we do about that? What do people like? Spencer Pratt mocking Mayor Bass's handling of the Palisades fire. The way that he's doing it with actual high quality AI that's not AI slop. People engage with that. People engage with his IRL videos where he's lip syncing Sabrina Carpenter house tour and showing off his Airstream trailer because it's sarcastic. It's showing like that he's upset but he's making the most of it about losing his house to the fire. Authentic IRL videos of candidates walking the streets. That's something that people really like. Again, Spencer Pratt is doing great at this. He's going around and showing like playgrounds that have been taken over by cartels and drug addicts or I know some of our local representatives here in North Carolina filmed themselves in their backyards like talking about what they did in the General Assembly this week. Really low key, not explaining, not being morally superior, intellectually superior. They're just back and forth explaining it. Candidates and elected officials showing off their lives like Senator Kennedy literally showing off the elliptical underneath his carport. That was hilarious. People like that. I was reading through the comments and even liberals thought it was funny and enjoyed watching it and like Senator Kennedy because he's relatable because he's engaging because he doesn't try to lecture and be morally superior to anybody else. Young people crave authentic, unscripted, real people and we can smell out a scripted, polished PR trade candidate or institution from a mile away. And I want to be clear. I'm not saying that being scripted and being PR trained is inherently bad because sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes, you know, we cannot have like the CDC or the WHO or the Department of Homeland Security and things like that being like all eye on the live stream. But some things just need to be scripted and polished and PR trained like our military and our police. It makes them more professional. Those are professional institutions. So I'm not saying that it's inherently a bad thing. But what I am saying is that you need to know that Gen Z and Gen Alpha can tell that we will deeply analyze any candidate or any institution or figurehead that exhibits any of those PR trained, polished like characteristics. And nine times out of ten, if it's like a professional institution or like somebody that's extremely responsible for people's lives, you just kind of take it on the chin and accept that that is how those institutions or people need to operate. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha will deeply analyze it until they figure out why or how and whether or not they legitimately trust that person. Now, I don't think that young people are rejecting leadership and structure or community like I feel like all of the Black pill headlines say like, oh, Gen Z is rejecting community or, you know, they're social introverts or they're just online natives and they want to stay on the Internet. I don't think that's true. I know a lot of people in my generation that genuinely want to have real human connection. They want to have leadership positions. They want to have structure, but they don't trust institutions in the way that they are formed. You know, historically, things are changing. Things are progressing. I think institutions are becoming a lot less scripted, which is why you see Gen Z moving into those spaces more recently. I think that my generation is searching for forms of trust that feel more human, more transparent and more emotionally real. The future political movements that succeed will likely understand community before messaging, authenticity before polish, relationships before institutions and creators before corporate style communication. And honestly, this is one of the defining political and cultural shifts of our generation. The Internet permanently changed how authority works. Trump permanently exposed the swamp. COVID permanently exposed institutional corruption. Social media permanently gave regular everyday people like you and me a voice in the organizations, the leaders, the movements that fail to adapt to this new reality will continue losing to younger generations. They will continue losing power and they will continue losing influence. What's actually super important to know is that those who win may not actually be more intellectually stimulating or have better ideas than the person who loses. They might not be more qualified than the person who loses. They will end up being more relatable. They will end up making others think that they're more honest, even if they in fact are not. So it's up to those who actually do have better ideas, who do have better plans, who are intellectually more stimulating, who are more honest, who are legitimately more relatable, who are I think I already said this, but it it like bears repeating again, more qualified. It is up to those people who are ready to challenge the institutions, who are ready to make change and who are ready to restore our country to catch up and to get on board with the new era of conservatism, because we don't want a bunch of poser influencers taking over our institutions and not having the qualifications, ideas, or experience to do what is needed to restore our country. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, share the show and follow at the Reagan Faulkner Show and at the Wilmington Standard on social media, because we are going to be diving much, much, much deeper into these broader cultural and political frameworks over the summer. Drop a comment on what topics you want me to cover next, because I really do value y'all's input. I really believe that the future of politics, media, and institutions is being completely reshaped right now in real time. 2026 and 2028 are going to be the years that we just see an insane transformation in how our political institutions, government institutions, and media in general, just transformation how they meet their audiences and communicate. I think it's gonna be really interesting to watch and I want this show to be part of that conversation. So thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you on the next one.