The Return to Realness

AI Videos, GLP-1, and Christian Influencers

Three things got me thinking yesterday about what I’ll call the “return to realness.”

First, Google released a new AI tool, Veo 3, that can generate near life-like video, complete with speech and ambient noise. Second, YouTube served me a video exposing a health influencer who built a following selling ebooks on how to lose weight by “getting your macros right,” while secretly using GLP-1 injections. Third, I saw that a former Reformed, patriarchal wife influencer, someone I’ve always found to be sweet and sincere, had swum the Tiber and joined the Roman Catholic Church.

There’s a common thread here: the internet. It’s the stage where all these dramas play out, defined by speed, spectacle, and synthetic realities.

The internet flattens the world. It takes what’s complex, hidden, and slowly formed, and turns it into something quick and consumable—a reel, a short, a hot take, a product. It creates the illusion of closeness with strangers and the illusion of truth through repetition. It rewards novelty over stability, speed over thoughtfulness, performance over character.

That’s why Veo 3 isn’t just another tech gimmick. It pushes the boundary of what counts as “real,” making it even harder to distinguish between the actual and the artificial. That’s why a health influencer can sell fake weight-loss methods—the aesthetic matters more than the truth. And that’s why public theological conversions, once the slow fruit of deep wrestling, can now happen in fast-forward, complete with a content arc and monetization strategy. It’s not always a grift, but it’s always close to performance.

The internet isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just inform us, it forms us. And it does so in ways most people don’t notice until the damage is done.

But people are starting to notice. Trust in online content is fading. Sure, our parents might still be fooled by AI-generated videos. But the younger generation is growing up suspicious. They assume most things online are fake. They question the credibility of influencers, whether fitness gurus or YouTube pastors, because they’ve seen too many go from “Reformed is the only way” to “I’ve come home to Rome,” or “I’m now a catechumen in the Orthodox Church.” They recognize that a lot of these guys are either grifters or unstable attention addicts.

Real life has taken a beating in the internet age. But ironically, the increasing realness of fakes might be what drives people back to the real.

And that’s where I think things are heading. The future is local. Local is where you can engage the world with all your senses—where you can see, hear, touch, and test what's actually true. It’s where you can build trust that isn’t propped up by branding or algorithms, but by shared meals, long conversations, and a track record that can’t be faked.

The return to realness starts when we stop letting the internet tell us what’s true and start paying attention to what’s right in front of us.