Hi everyone, I'm Brinay Brown and this is unlocking us.

Okay, y'all, this is our fourth episode in a series that I am calling living beyond human scale the

possibilities the cost and the role of community and this is going to be a really

unique series because it crosses over between unlocking us and the

Dared Lead Podcast. We're talking about everything from mental health and

social media to how do we get ready to work with and not for artificial intelligence. I think there are a lot of

possibilities for innovation and really great change and we're getting pressed to live really beyond how we are socially, biologically,

cognitively, and spiritually wired.

This conversation is tough today. I'm talking with Jennifer Valentino DeVries and Michael

Keller. They are both award-winning journalists for the New York Times and they wrote an article. It appeared in the New York

Times on the 22nd of February. The title was A Marketplace of Girl

Influencers managed by moms and stalked by men.

And I've been really interested in the last year and a half, maybe two years, about the influencer economy.

And, oh my God, it's so nuts how susceptible we are, how pissed off we get.

I even found myself like coming across clips of me and the context of the clips were cut off and I thought

oh my God what is happening on social media where everybody's got an idea and a belief and

everyone's selling you shit all the time it just made me crazy.

So we reached out to Jennifer and Michael again the New York Times reporters and asked if they would talk to us about the investigation that led to this article

What they learned specifically about these are basically

young girls,

I mean young, like elementary school

through, you know, not old enough to have accounts

...