Every influencer knows that trust is the key element of their influence. Everyone talks about the importance of gaining trust, but nobody knows how to gain trust systematically.

The hardest task is to explain simple things. Try to tell someone what water, sleep, or air is. Everyone understands it but will give you different descriptions of it. The same goes for trust. Everyone understands it but can’t share a complete guide on how to gain trust. That is why, in this essay, I want to figure out for myself what trust actually is and how to build it.

I started thinking about what trust really is after hearing a story about the FBI that I want to share with you. I believe this is one of the greatest lessons for influencers about how they can use the same tactics to build trust with their followers.

The FBI needed sensitive information from a prisoner who refused to share it. Instead of using traditional interrogation methods, they took a more creative approach: they planted a fake prisoner in the same cell. The interesting part? The original prisoner knew the new cellmate was an FBI agent.

Every day, this "co-prisoner" would receive a new newspaper and casually start discussing the news with the original prisoner. Over time, they began building a bond. The prisoner, who had kept silent, eventually opened up and shared secrets he had never told anyone else.

There are three key elements that built trust:

1. The same location
2. The same context of discussion
3. Time spent together in meaningful conversation

These are the same elements that influencers can use to build trust with their followers. Let’s take a closer look at each one

Locations work like a filter. For example, right now I’m writing this essay from the airport in Vietnam, waiting for my flight to Hong Kong. I could leave my laptop at the airport restaurant when I go to the bathroom, but I would never leave it at a street food market or a railway station.

Location can also be non-physical. Content from trusted sources like Wikipedia is trusted, while content from shitty websites filled with ads is not, even if the information might be the same.

A post on the page of an influencer with 1 million followers automatically gets more trust than a post on a page with only 1,000 followers. The content may be the same, but the digital locations are completely different

Context allows you to talk or be in the same location with someone and spend time with them. For example, if a person starts talking to me at the airport about "flight details," it feels natural, and we can easily start a conversation.

That’s why all dating coaches teach men to start a conversation naturally, based on context, because it feels safe. I remember meeting a beautiful girl at the airport. I saw she was reading a book that I had also read. It was easy to start a conversation—just ask, 'How’s the book?’

Another great example comes from using a hookup app. After a few messages, a girl invited me to her place. I started to understand why girls are scared to visit men’s homes because I was also scared.

It didn’t feel natural at first, but my fucker instincts took over, and I went 😎
I knocked on the door, she opened it, and then moved toward the bathroom, saying, 'Come in and sit, I’m still in the shower. Give me 5 minutes.' I stepped inside and saw a two-room apartment. I went into the second room to make sure no one else was there. I swear, at that moment, I thought someone would jump out of the wardrobe, tie me to the radiator, and rape me 😂

I sat on the sofa near the bookshelves. As a former architect, I appreciated the beauty of the design. The place was decorated in a retro style with luxurious 80s furniture. I started to relax more and more.

While she was in the shower, I started looking at the books on the shelf, and at some point, I saw a very unique book that I had already read.

It was a book written by S.O. Khan-Magomedov about the famous Russian avant-garde architect Ivan Leonidov.

This is a very rare book for a very specific domain, and I realized that anyone who owns this book on their bookshelf couldn’t possibly tie me to a radiator and rape me. 😀

When she got out of the shower, we had a good conversation, and after a few hours, we had good sex.

So, it was a story where a single context—a book—could build trust from zero to ten in a second.

Time is the most important element in building trust. Without time, trust can’t develop.

Why do you trust your neighbors? Because you spend a lot of time with them in the same location.

The same goes for your classmates. I still trust mine, even if I haven’t seen them in 20 years, because I spent so much time with them before.

Time always works in combination with context and location. In the story about the prisoner, the context was the newspaper with the latest news. It was an icebreaker and a topic of conversation between the agent and the prisoner. The prison was the physical location, and time was the number of days the agent and the prisoner spent together.

For example, in this essay you’re reading right now, the context is about influencers and creators. The location is online, on my website. So, the more time you spend with me, consuming specific content, the more you will trust me.

When you spend time with someone, you automatically start to trust them more.
That’s why I always tell young men in dating: If you want to please a girl, just spend time with her on three dates. Don’t rush it, don’t try to find magic words to charm her. Just go for three dates and be yourself.

The same advice applies to women who want to get married. Try to throw as few tantrums as possible in the first two years of your relationship. Do everything you can to avoid scaring off your fiancé. The goal is to make him get used to you.

The same thing happens with content on social media. Your level of trust with followers is directly related to the time they spend consuming your content.

I always use this example with movies: How much time have you spent with Tom Cruise? Let’s say you’ve watched five movies with him. That’s about 10 hours. It’s not a lot, right?

I mentioned this example in my essay "The End of Following," where I talked about Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. All women trust “Carrie’s opinion,” but they’ve spent six seasons with her. Sounds like a lot, but it’s only 47 hours.

From my observation, we need to spend 3-5 hours in 3 separate sessions. For example, if I watch 3 YouTube videos, each lasting 1.5 hours, I will completely trust this person. However, if I watch, let’s say, 3 hours in one sitting, the trust will be lower.

I think our brains need some breaks between sessions.

I remember when a dating coach said that if you want to have sex tonight, you need to change locations 3-4 times in one night. This creates an illusion in a woman’s mind that a lot of moments (sets of content) have passed, and we’ve already spent a lot of time together. It feels like 3 dates on different days.
With new formats like TikTok, everything has changed. People consume short content more than long-form content. That’s why a creator with a 1 million-view TikTok video will likely get less trust and fewer sales than a YouTuber with 10k video views.

The same happens with short text content, like posts on X.com. It’s all about those small touches.

On Instagram, the situation is better because we have Stories and Reels. In this type of content, an influencer can make multiple touches with followers in video format.

Let’s try some calculations. Imagine followers spend 1 minute consuming your Reel or Stories. 5 hours equals 300 minutes, which is 300 posts in any format. I believe followers will start to trust you much earlier. From my observation, if a follower consumes 30 posts, they already trust you.

It happens much faster than on YouTube, because of the "sets." The picture is constantly changing, and the follower feels like they’ve been living with you for 10 years.

Based on this observation, I can say that the main goal of influencers is simply to get followers to consume a few hours of different types of content. Imagine that this journey of content consumption is like your "three dates," when you're not selling anything.

It’s an interesting mindset when you stop thinking in terms of follower numbers and start thinking about how much time they’ve spent consuming your content
I call it “depth of following.”

When you look closely, everything around us can be seen as time arbitrage, and trust is no different.

Think about it: You have a friend you've known for years, and you trust them completely. Then one day, they introduce you to a friend of theirs. After the introduction, you naturally start to trust this new person more, simply because of the trust you have in your friend.

We've all heard phrases like, "Oh, this is my old friend. I’ve known them for 15 years from college." That means your friend has spent 15 years building trust with this person, and you’ve spent years building trust with your friend. The moment your friend vouches for someone, the trust you have in them is passed on, and you start to trust their friend too.

An introduction from your college friend will carry more trust than an introduction from someone you met at a party yesterday.

The same principle applies in social media. You follow an influencer and consume their content for a year. Suddenly, you see a collaboration with another influencer you don’t know. Subconsciously, your brain applies "one year of trust" to this new person. It doesn’t mean you automatically trust them, but you begin to transfer some of the trust you have in the original influencer to the new person, making you more likely to be loyal.

An introduction from your college friend will carry more trust than an introduction from someone you met at a party yesterday.

In specific expert domains, we also observe time arbitrage in gaining trust. For example, doctors often mention how many years of experience they have. The perfect match for a doctor is a reference from a friend, proving they have years of practice. I would trust a doctor in their later years more than a 25-year-old excellent student.

Titles like "doctor," "professor," "colonel," or "black belt" in martial arts are also about time. When I was doing Karate, I learned a lot from Japanese culture. There are 10 steps to the black belt, and you can only move on to the next step after 6 months to a year. You can’t get a black belt in 2 years; it’s technically impossible. That’s why owning a black belt in Karate is so trustworthy—it instantly shows that the person is experienced.

When 100 doctors with 20+ years of experience each tell you a diagnosis, you believe them because of "the arbitrage of time." You don’t need to study medicine for 20 years to start trusting them.

It works in other areas too. Let’s be honest—there are many people with 10+ years of experience who do their job poorly. And we see students who can sometimes do the job better than these experienced people, but people still trust the specialists who have spent more time perfecting their craft.

If you want to gain trust quickly, you need to surround yourself with as many people as possible who have proven experience, and they need to say you’re good.

This is known as social proof.

This is the easiest but most expensive way.

If you want to build trust "for free," you need to increase the number of minutes a person spends consuming your content.

Time is one way to gain trust.

If we dig deeper, we will see that trust is fundamentally about safety. Our brain's "gatekeeper" operates on an if/else condition. When we encounter something, our gatekeeper automatically asks, "Is this safe or dangerous? Will this thing eat me or not?" This instinct comes from ancient times when we lived in caves.

I like the quote from top soccer coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi:
"Anything that is not clear is always suspicious."

Imagine if aliens came and asked you for help. I think 99.9% of people would reject them and wait. But after a few years of talking with aliens, you’d see that they are not "eating us." You would eventually start to trust them because they become understandable and predictable.

When the boy who was scared of dogs saw five other boys playing with them and noticed the dogs didn’t bite the other boys, he started to trust them and began playing with them too.

If you or your content is not understandable, you will always face a problem with influence.

I understand that we live in a safer world today than our ancestors did, but safety is not just physical. It’s also about financial and emotional safety.

When we want to buy something from a stranger, we want to be sure we won’t be deceived. That’s why all review websites like Yelp exist. The "following" on social media works the same way.

When you visit someone’s Instagram page and see that people you trust are also following them, you feel like, 'This person won’t eat me because they didn’t eat my friends.’

When you see that an Instagram profile also follows people you follow, you automatically see the trust. Following someone is like reading the same book. You share the same context.

It’s also about scaling time. Let’s say you see a new Instagram influencer, and 50 of your friends are following them. The influencer might have 100k followers, but because you know the 50 friends who follow them, you understand how much time it takes to gain those real 100k followers. Those 50 friends are real, and their following proves that a lot of time has been spent on this influencer. Your brain processes this as "safe," not dangerous. The decision to trust is automatic.

This part can be added to the context, but I think it’s a little different. It’s more about values and lifestyle. We trust people who look like we do. The simplest example is nationality. When you go to a foreign country, you’ll trust fellow countrymen more than locals in important matters. You’ll trust people from the same university more as well.

The same applies to professions. I have a great story about how I met my wife. I graduated from the Architectural Academy and always liked creative girls—painters, designers, actresses, etc. Only with these types of girls did I have a deep mental connection because our view of the world was as similar as possible.
I was at a party at a villa in Bali and met her. She was wearing a specific classic suit with a colored pattern. It was super elegant and aesthetic. I asked Anna, “What do you do for a living?” She answered that she is an interior designer and decorator. I liked that.

After the party, I checked her Instagram and saw that she paints. This is my favorite. Looking through her art, I realized we had a lot in common. Later, we discussed it, and she told me how she filters guys on Tinder. She uploads her art in her photos, and if the men ask about the art, she can figure out that they understand art. This is how we define whether someone is a friend or foe—based on our shared values and understanding.

One more example: My friend has a sports car, and every time he drives, people who like that type of car start talking to him as if they’ve known each other for years. As for me, I’ve always been indifferent to cars, but for many car owners, it works like a 'car tribe.’

Summarizing this essay, I think we can draw some conclusions. The key thing is the time that people spend with you or your content.

No tricks, no magic words.

It’s not about the quality of the content alone—though, of course, it matters because if you have bad content, people won’t spend time consuming it.

The main problem for many influencers is that they try to gain trust too quickly by using manipulative tactics. It’s like a hustler trying to hook up with a girl right now or a woman wanting to get married after six months of dating. It doesn’t work like that.

Just create content that you enjoy and be patient.