(How) Creators Make Culture
Who people trust now.
Consider the seatbelt.
The three-point seatbelt was invented in 1959. By the early 1960s, the data was unambiguous: it saved lives, dramatically, in almost every type of accident. Yet less than 15% of Americans used seatbelts regularly as late as 1983.
Some drivers were so hostile to the idea that they cut the seatbelts out of their vehicles entirely. One reader wrote to the New York Times that mandatory seatbelts violated "the basic rights of individual freedom."
Think about what that means. The technology existed. The data was overwhelming. The law eventually followed. None of it was enough.
Because the problem was cultural. People didn't feel like wearing a seatbelt was something people like them did. It felt uncomfortable, bureaucratic, vaguely insulting.
Today, 91.9% of Americans wear seatbelts in the front seat. Buckling up is what responsible people do. Enough people modeled the behavior and normalized it.
But it took decades.
If you have genuine influence on culture — if you change what feels normal, what feels possible, what feels worth wanting — you are doing something more powerful than most politicians, executives, and even institutions ever manage.
Cultural systems are among the most complex, resistant structures human beings have ever created.
They move slowly. Governments fall faster than cultures change. Technologies diffuse faster than values shift. You can pass a law, build a product, win an election and the underlying culture-led behaviour will outlast all of it.
If you wish you had a smart, capable cofounder to help you figure out what to do next, I had a few breakthrough moments talking to aicofounder.
Not only did it change how I see my business, it documented my processes and created a plan for me. (And it has a generous free plan.)
You don’t want to be the person who takes forever to start putting on a seatbelt. Try aicofounder now.
For most of the 20th century, culture came from institutions. Television, magazines and record labels told you what people like you did, looked like and listened to.
Things are different now.
When Gallup began tracking Americans' trust in news media in the early 1970s, attitudes were overwhelmingly positive. By 2024, only 31% of Americans said they had a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in mass media, while 36% said they had no trust at all — the highest level ever recorded.
So who do people trust now?
Henrik Karlsson lives on a small island off the coast of Sweden with his wife and two daughters. He homeschools his children. He thinks slowly. He writes occasionally about the texture of his life.
He does not post daily. He has no content calendar. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, studied what performs well on any platform.
He has 47,000 subscribers. A significant portion of them pay.
His readers don't just think differently. They start to live differently. They slow down. They reconsider what they're optimizing for. They start to identify with him and to behave like him.
Karlsson isn't teaching anything, exactly. He is simply living, visibly, in a way that is coherent and specific and genuinely his own. And it turns out to be profoundly contagious.
Increasingly, people trust people.
There’s no time like the present to be a content creator. Any type of content creator: a teacher or someone modelling their life for others; a writer or a video maker.
This is your moment to define culture. To be what you want to see more of.
I know AI is trying to hijack content right now, but you must remember that content creation is a business-to-consumer venture. And while companies are fast to adopt anything that boosts productivity and cut costs, consumers (aka humans) will always crave other humans. It’s cultural.
The only question is how do you become the kind of creator who makes culture that magnetises an audience.
And the answer is rather clear, if you really look at the patterns.
Keep reading for the full analysis.