Every dataset I can find points the same direction: trust is migrating from institutions to identifiable individuals. That migration is the demand engine of the mentor economy — and it comes with a cost nobody selling the trend wants to mention.
TL;DR: Across a decade of longitudinal survey data, trust has moved from institutions to identifiable individuals. A peer — "someone like me" — is now trusted to tell the truth about new technology at exactly the same rate as scientists (74% vs 74%, Edelman Trust Barometer 2024), while government leaders sit at 42% and journalists at 49%. Nearly 7 in 10 people worldwide fear institutional leaders are deliberately misleading them (Edelman 2026). Individual creators have overtaken news organizations for attention among under-35s (48% vs 41%, Reuters Institute, 2025), and 49% of consumers now buy at least monthly because an individual — not a brand — recommended it (Sprout Social, 2024). This is the demand-side engine of the mentor economy. It also lowers the gate for charlatans, which is why evidence and specificity — not audience size — are becoming the real currency.
I want to document something in this dispatch that I think is the single most important demand-side fact for anyone selling expertise: the buyer you are trying to reach has quietly rewired who they believe. Not gradually rewired in the way trends are usually gradual — measurably, across every major longitudinal dataset, in one consistent direction. Away from institutions. Toward identifiable individuals.
My position, stated up front: this shift is real, it is structural rather than cyclical, and it is the reason a single practitioner with a track record can now out-convert a billion-dollar brand. But it is not an unmixed good, and the people cheerleading it hardest tend to skip the part where it also hands a megaphone to confident fakes. Both halves matter. Here is the evidence file.
Start with the cleanest single data point I know. Edelman has run its Trust Barometer for over two decades — it is the closest thing we have to a longitudinal instrument on institutional trust. The 2024 edition asked respondents who they trust to tell them the truth about new innovations and technologies. Scientists: 74%. "Someone like me": 74%.
Sit with that tie for a second. A peer — no institution behind them, no credential, no letterhead — is now exactly as credible as a scientist on the most technical category of question a survey can ask. And the institutional roster below that tie reads like a demolition report: government leaders trusted by 42%, journalists by 49%, CEOs by 51%, with the media as a category distrusted by 50% of respondents (same source). The people whose literal job is to be believed are believed by roughly half their audience or less. The person who has simply walked the same path as the buyer matches the top of the table.
Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2024, official release
Two years on, the pattern has hardened into something Edelman itself describes as trust retreating into the near and personal. The 2026 Trust Barometer — 34,000 respondents across 28 countries — finds "my employer" trusted by 78% of employees, versus 64% for business generally and 53% for government. Neighbors sit at 64%. Trust in coworkers and in family and friends each gained 11 net points in a single year. Trust hasn't evaporated; it has relocated. The closer and more identifiable the person, the more of it they hold. The more abstract and institutional the entity, the less.
The mechanism isn't mysterious, and the 2026 data names it directly: nearly 7 in 10 respondents globally fear that government officials, business leaders, and journalists are deliberately misleading them (2026 Edelman Trust Barometer). Not "getting it wrong sometimes." Deliberately misleading. That is a verdict about incentives, not competence.
And it explains the peer-trust tie better than any theory about attention spans or platforms. When you suspect an institution's message is shaped by what the institution needs you to believe, the rational move is to reroute your trust to someone whose incentives you can actually inspect: a person with a name, a face, a visible track record, and skin in the same game you're in. "Someone like me" wins not because peers are smarter than institutions but because their motives are legible. You can audit a person. You cannot audit a press office.
Survey attitudes are cheap; behavior is the test. So look at where people actually go for information. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 recorded a first: in the US, social media and video networks (54%) overtook both TV news (50%) and news websites and apps (48%) as a news source. And within those networks, it is individuals — not outlet accounts — leading the shift: 22% of Americans encountered news or commentary from Joe Rogan in a single week, and in France, 22% of under-35s get news from one individual creator, Hugo Travers.
The Reuters Institute's companion study on news creators quantifies the preference directly: among under-35s using social media for news, 48% say they pay more attention to individual creators and personalities than to mainstream news outlets (41%), with creators substantially eclipsing news organizations on TikTok and Instagram and outpacing traditional brands across the US, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. Pew Research Center adds the structural detail that should stop every institution cold: 21% of US adults — and 37% of 18-29 year-olds — regularly get news from influencers, and 77% of the 500 most-followed news influencers have no affiliation with any news organization at all. Sixty-five percent of their consumers say those individuals helped them understand current events. The institution isn't even in the supply chain anymore.
For anyone selling expertise, here is the commercially decisive layer. Trust in individuals isn't just where people get information — it's why they buy. Sprout Social's 2024 Influencer Marketing Report (2,000 US and UK consumers, February 2024) found 49% of consumers make purchases daily, weekly, or monthly because of influencer posts, and 30% trust influencers more than they did just six months earlier — the trust line still climbing, mid-shift. Among Gen Z, 87% are more willing to buy from brands that partner with individuals beyond social content. Read that from the brand's side: the most institutionally polished companies on Earth now route their own messages through individuals, because the institutional voice no longer carries.
| Signal of the shift | Source · Year |
|---|---|
| 74% = 74% — "someone like me" ties scientists on truth about innovation; gov leaders 42%, journalists 49%, CEOs 51% | Edelman Trust Barometer · 2024 |
| ~69% fear institutional leaders deliberately mislead them; employer 78% vs business 64% vs government 53%; coworkers and family/friends +11 net points YoY | Edelman Trust Barometer · 2026 |
| 54% vs 50% — social/video passes TV news in the US; Joe Rogan reaches 22% of Americans in a week | Reuters Institute Digital News Report · 2025 |
| 48% vs 41% — under-35s attend more to individual creators than mainstream outlets | Reuters Institute, Mapping News Creators · 2025 |
| 77% of top news influencers unaffiliated with any news org; 37% of 18-29s get news from them regularly | Pew Research Center · 2024 |
| 49% buy at least monthly on individual recommendations; 87% of Gen Z reward brands that route through individuals | Sprout Social, Influencer Marketing Report · 2024 |
All figures as published by the named source; links in-text above.
Now the part the trust-shift cheerleaders leave out. Every gate that credentials used to keep — badly, unfairly, but kept — is now open. When the market stops requiring an institution to vouch for you, it stops requiring it for everyone, including the person who has never done the thing they teach. The same 77% of top news influencers with no newsroom affiliation includes both genuine independent practitioners and people optimizing pure confidence. The same 49% who buy on an individual's word can be sold garbage on an individual's word. Disintermediation does not filter for honesty. It removes the filter.
Which is exactly why the second-order effect matters more than the shift itself: in a market where anyone can claim expertise, buyers learn to demand proof-of-work instead of credentials. Not a diploma — a body of visible, checkable evidence. Specific numbers with named sources. Documented client outcomes. Positions committed to in public, where being wrong costs you. The practitioners winning this environment aren't the loudest; they're the most auditable. Vague authority — "trust me, I'm certified" — is precisely the institutional signal buyers just finished discounting. Specific evidence is the individual-scale replacement. (It's also, not coincidentally, what AI search engines reward when they decide which individual to cite — I covered that mechanic in How to Get Found by AI Search.)
This is the demand engine underneath everything I write in this ledger. The mentor economy — defined properly here — is not a supply-side story about creators wanting freedom. It is a demand-side story about buyers who no longer believe institutions and are actively looking for a person: someone identifiable, someone who has done the thing, someone whose incentives they can read. The book states the mechanism in one passage, and I'll quote it verbatim because it was written before most of the 2025-2026 data above landed:
"The trust gap between those two relationships is enormous. The consultant earns trust through credentials, brand, and process. The Founder earns trust through having walked the path the client is about to walk. Credentials buy attention. Lived experience buys belief." — The Mentor Economy
That is the whole trust shift in four sentences. Institutions sell credentials, brand, and process — the three currencies the data shows depreciating. An individual practitioner sells lived experience — the one currency appreciating in every table above. If you have spent twenty years earning judgment inside an industry, the market has never been structured more in your favor; that's the case I made in Why Twenty Years of Experience Is Your Most Valuable Asset. But the shift only pays out if you present your expertise the way this new market verifies it: specific, evidenced, checkable, and attached to your name.
Three working conclusions from the file:
The trust didn't disappear when it left the institutions. It's sitting there, waiting to be earned by individuals willing to be specific. I'll keep this dispatch updated as the next Barometer and Digital News Report editions land.
This dispatch is the demand-side evidence. The book is the supply-side system — how to convert lived experience into the kind of auditable, AI-leveraged practice this trust shift rewards. Free copy, you cover $9.95 shipping.
Get the book →On several hard measures, yes. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found "someone like me" is trusted by 74% of respondents to tell the truth about new innovations — exactly tied with scientists at 74%, and well ahead of government leaders (42%), journalists (49%), and CEOs (51%). The 2026 Barometer shows trust concentrating further in close relationships: employers at 78% versus business generally at 64% and government at 53%.
The strongest documented driver is suspected bad faith: the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer (34,000 respondents, 28 countries) found nearly 7 in 10 people fear government officials, business leaders, and journalists are deliberately misleading them. When institutions are suspected of motivated communication, buyers reroute trust to identifiable individuals whose incentives and track record they can inspect directly.
In news, measurably. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 found social and video networks (54%) overtook TV news (50%) as a US news source for the first time, and Pew found 21% of US adults — 37% of 18-29s — regularly get news from influencers, 77% of whom have no affiliation with any news organization.
Yes. Sprout Social's 2024 Influencer Marketing Report (2,000 US/UK consumers) found 49% make purchases at least monthly because of influencer posts, 30% trust influencers more than they did six months earlier, and 87% of Gen Z consumers are more willing to buy from brands that partner with influencers beyond social content.
It does — that is the honest cost of disintermediation. When credentials stop gating credibility, both real practitioners and confident fakes get through. The market's emerging filter is visible proof-of-work: specific claims, named sources, documented results, and a track record that can be checked. Vague authority is exactly what buyers just stopped trusting.
Author of The Mentor Economy and co-founder of MentorMe. He writes about turning hard-won expertise into AI-leveraged one-person businesses.
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