There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling.
An avatar with a life you can’t verify. A brand voice that may or may not be a person. A “thought leader” whose insight was generated in ten seconds by a model that has never made payroll, never lost a client, and never sat with a team through a hard quarter.
We are being sold distance — virtual worlds, synthetic experiences, curated lifestyles — at the exact moment when we need proximity the most.
In 2016, I started a company with $15,000 that I had saved up from random, uninspiring jobs, a few people who trusted me, and the kind of proximity that is rare these days.
10 years later, we’ve grown through “referrals,” valuable leads that have converted into profitable partnerships, and the crucial work of our global and in-person team of 30+ employees.
I see that the world’s priorities and technologies are changing with the rise of AI in the workplace.
With more instantaneous answers from AI Overviews, usage of tools like ChatGPT and Claude leading to newly formed categories titled Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and people working from home, human interaction is becoming limited. So as a business owner, who enjoys going into our Newport Beach office each day, I have come to appreciate when employees and clients make the effort to take an in-person meeting and the opportunity to strengthen relationships.
These are the people I’ve come to love working with because I know they share the same values, that humans and the relationships we form in the office matter.
The Data has a Twist: Trust is Moving Closer to Home
Look at the numbers: Ahrefs analyzed nearly a million newly published web pages and found that 74% contained AI-generated content. Research from Graphite found that AI-written articles briefly overtook human-written articles as far back as 2024.
Although these numbers are daunting, the comfort is that people still recognize when they are being fed avatars and manufactured lifestyles.
The evidence shows up in where people are placing their trust. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — included 34,000 respondents across 28 countries — found that 70% of people are now unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone with different values, backgrounds, or information sources. Edelman named the growing use of generative AI as one of the top five forces eroding trust worldwide, alongside inflation and misinformation.
Overall trust in global and local institutions are collapsing with national government leaders’ trust scoring down by 16 points and major news organizations down 11. The silver-lining in all of this data is that trust in people in close proximity went the other direction; trust in neighbors, family, and friends rose to 11 points.
Read that again.
In the most distrustful moment in the survey’s 26-year history, the one place trust is growing is close to home. Edelman’s prescription for companies?
Stop acting like faceless multinationals and move to become what they call “polynational.” Polynational companies visibly and substantively invest in their local communities where they operate, thus localizing and feeding into the cycle of relational proximity.
They’re describing something we’ve been practicing for a decade. I call it Owning Your Backyard.
The Trust Vacuum is Rewiring Human Connection
The Edelman Trust Barometer shows that as “technological disruption intensifies,” trust is growing scarce. It’s no secret in 2026 that AI-generated content is flooding every feed, and is quietly rewriting the terms of human connection.
Something I’ve learned over the years: trust isn’t a feature you can ship. It’s accumulated, slowly, through consistency that can’t be faked at scale.
Across every kind of relationship — business, familial, romantic — new technology has changed the rules: it takes more than proximity to form a real bond now. It takes proof of a real person.
This shifts what it means to reach someone: the businesses and people who succeed in the next decade won’t be the ones with the most sophisticated AI stack. They’ll be the ones who can prove, through consistency, empathy, and a willingness to show up, that they are real.
Connection is becoming less about access and more about verification: not “can I reach you,” but “are you who you say you are.” This skepticism is encouraging us to think about our new buzz word:
Relational Proximity
Proximity is the New Differentiator
Real proximity is relational, not geographic. It’s the compounding trust that builds when you are consistently present — when you answer the phone, respond to the text, show up at the office on a bad day, hire from the community you live in, and pay taxes back into the county that gave you your first client.
Proximity is the distance between what a brand claims and what a person has actually experienced of you. Technology can shrink geographic distance to zero. It cannot shrink relational distance at all. Only showing up and seeing someone in person does that.
What I’ve found: proximity scales.
The strongest relationships in my global network — collaborators and clients I may only ever see through a screen — work because they’re built on the same foundation of finding commonalities, checking in, and holding ourselves accountable for being part of a new community.
A virtual connection can absolutely be a real one, but only if there’s something real underneath it. I often ask myself: what’s the use in building a digital presence if it’s not to bring truth and community to a wider audience?
The Ledger on Proximity
Let me not oversell this. Proximity has real costs, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of manufactured authenticity. Here’s the balance sheet:
| Dimension | Strength | Limit | Why it Still Holds |
| Relational Proximity (The Principle) | Compounds with every interaction — ten years of answered phone calls and showing up to community events is a moat no competitor can buy. | Slow to build, and refuses to scale in a straight line. | Scarcity is where value lives – investing time into building a strong relationship isn’t fruitless, instead, it’s building on a foundation of trust that compounds long-term. |
| Own Your Backyard (The Tactic) | The cheapest, highest-trust place to start — Edelman’s “polynational” data shows local investment is what people now reward.
The Flying V team has employees reaching from Newport Beach to the East Coast and even internationally. (See more on relational proximity). This is a plus because we are familiar with multiple demographics and marketing climates. |
Sounds like a privilege reserved for dense markets, and a closed door to remote, rural, or solo operators. | Your backyard is where you start, not where you must stay — the principle travels even when the geography doesn’t because it is rooted in making sure you do not let people down. It’s easier to skip a Zoom meeting than a coffee meeting. |
| Authenticity
(The Goal) |
The one asset AI cannot manufacture, and the thing every algorithm is quietly reaching to find out. | Authenticity has become a marketing costume — the staged selfie, the performed “we’re a family” post. 99% of it is not real or grounded in reality. At Flying V Group we see and dig for stories underneath what the LLM can capture. | It can’t be claimed, only proven — through pattern and repetition that a synthetic operator can’t sustain. We will see this play out with the “death” of billion-agent, zero-human company models. |
Read down the right-hand column and the resolution reveals itself: the limits belong to the tactic, not the principle. “It won’t scale” and “it’s a luxury good” are complaints about geographic literalism, which define the mistake of hearing “own your backyard” as “hire within a two-mile radius.”
But geography was never the point.
The point is relational distance — the distance between what a brand claims and what a person has actually experienced of you. Which is distinct from the location-tech definitions of “proximity marketing,” beacons, and geofencing.
Define proximity as relational rather than geographic, and the contradiction falls apart. Relational distance can be closed from anywhere by anyone willing to do the work. Or put in the time.
Recently, I had the opportunity to close the geographic gap by traveling to Boston, Massachusetts for Hubspot’s UnBound conference. My approach to relational proximity was driven by my drive and determination to show up, network, and create lasting and authentic business relationships. Here’s an Instagram Reel highlighting the trip.
That is to say that some of our strongest relationships at Flying V Group are global relationships — whether it be from people who we only interact with on screen, to putting in the domestic and international travel time – either way we remain committed to one thing: showing up. These examples aren’t exceptions to owning your backyard, they’re what happens when you extend the same grounded, present, prove-it-again-and-again discipline past the property lines.
In the past ten years, I’ve pushed past this property line to meet clients where they are. Taking the time to travel and meet with Vaionic in Berlin, Germany, Penn-Elcom in Hastings, United Kingdom, Carvertise in Wilmington, Delaware, Guardsman Auto Club in Punta Gorda, Florida, and John Hancock in Boston, Massachusetts has not only given me career stories I can be proud of, but they have allowed me to establish authenticity and relational proximity as a powerful business practice.
Authenticity in business practice is about a choice; it’s choosing to prioritize the people before the company itself.
Own Your Backyard
As AI commoditizes content, the defensible moat swings back to human expertise, credibility, and local proximity.
To me and my team, owning your backyard is defined by building up a trustworthy reputation in the community, network, and market directly in front of you — hiring locally, showing up physically, reinvesting where you operate, compounding relational trust — before extending into distant or virtual growth channels.
Our mission starts at home. Over the years we have fostered relationships with California universities such as Chapman University, Loyola Marymount University, University California Irvine, and Concordia University by showing up for guest lectures, career fairs, networking nights, sponsoring business competitions, etc. Participation has even extended outside of state lines by participating in research studies with Rutgers University.
On top of this, we have sponsored and supported other community programs such as attending and sponsoring a table at a recent Legacy Night in support of Eli Home and their foundation. We’ve played in golf tournaments in support of Big Brothers Big Sisters OC and the Eli Shelby Foundation. Events like these support collaboration, networking, and future partnerships between local Newport Beach businesses.
Our community-outreach efforts have helped us build a name for ourselves as a top Orange County Digital Marketing Agency, but have also shown that we are willing to show up for the people in our backyard.
What we have learned: before extending our ambition into some distant, abstracted, virtual version of growth, we look at what’s already in front of us. The community we live in. The people down the street. The talent we could hire two miles from our office instead of sourcing it from an algorithm.
What This Means For You, Right Now
If you’re a CEO, an educator, a marketer, or anyone trying to make sense of the chaos, here is the playbook and it costs nothing:
Show up in person and on purpose. Momentum is built boots-on-the-ground, one handshake at a time, long before it shows up in a reporting or company financial dashboard. The post-COVID retreat into the box on the screen was supposed to be temporary. For too many people, it became a lifestyle. Break it immediately.
Let AI do the leveling and not the leading. Use the tools that are available. You are supposed to and we do, aggressively. But use them to remove friction, NEVER to remove you. The moment your presence becomes synthetic, you’ve surrendered the only advantage that was ever yours.
Publish what you know aggressively. The machines themselves reward original, first-hand, experience-based knowledge. Your ten years in the trenches is worth more in the AI era than it was before it — but only if you show up as yourself. Create videos and other content and upload them to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram presenting stats and figures from your business experience.
Hire close. Build capability in the communities you’re part of and living in. Edelman’s data says your employees already trust their employer more than any other institution on earth. That trust is a strategic asset that you should invest in.
The Opportunity is Right Outside Your Door
We hear constantly about what AI is going to take — the jobs, the trust, the truth.
Some of that is real. But human nature was not built on content. It was built on community, trust, and authenticity, and no model update can change that.
Content was always just the trace those things leave behind, the write-up of a relationship that already existed, the record of earned trust. We confused the product for the substance.
Overwhelming synthetic content is really an echo of these products with nothing behind them. It looks like the real thing until you reach for what should be underneath and close your hand on air. If anything, the flood of the synthetic has made the genuine content more valuable than ever before.
I’ll leave you with this: the opportunity you’ve been scrolling past is sitting right outside your front door — the community, the relationships, the people who will pick up when you call. You don’t need to escape into a virtual world to find growth. The virtual world, it turns out, needs you — grounded, present, and real.
