In December 2025, Kaitlyn Gilbride, a 22-year-old in the Bay Area, posted a video on the neuroscience of admiration. It was the first time she went “super viral”. Before that, she’d been posting how-to videos about applying to college, until she realised she could turn what she was learning in her psychology, human biology and neuroscience classes at Berkeley into explainers of her own. As it turned out, her peers were incredibly interested in learning more about the human brain. Almost overnight, Gilbride became what you might call a “thinkfluencer” – part of a growing cohort of creators using their platforms to explain ideas, share research and spark conversation.

These days, there’s an explainer video for every topic you can imagine, and swarms of thinkfluencers – often armed with tiny mics – popping up left, right and centre. Some have a niche. (Gilbride, for example, was inspired to fill what she saw as a gap in content from women in STEM online.) Others post their hottest takes in front of a green screen or sell DIY business strategies on Substack. Like everything on the internet, much of it is highly researched, and much of it is not – such is the nature of algorithmic culture, which rewards volume. Almost all of it, however, follows a similar format and at least has the appearance of being informative. At the very least, its popularity suggests that many young people want their scrolling to feel educational, or like a way of participating in cultural discourse.

Gilbride has a theory as to why: educational content is the antithesis of brain rot. “People are craving knowledge and videos of substance,” she says. “They don’t just want a makeup video or something funny – they want something to think about, to help them grow in different areas and that they can apply to and improve their lives.” This is why Gilbride’s videos that combine neuroscience with self-improvement advice – on how to be witty or talk to strangers, for example – have performed particularly well. Many of her followers are people who, in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, are missing human connection and eager to change their lives. 

“To be constantly churning out thoughtful commentary or analysis is an oxymoron because you can’t be thoughtful quickly. These short-form explainer videos are creating a facade of education, but the critique is that they’re only minutes long, so you can watch it and think, ‘OK, that was enriching; let’s move on to the next video‘”

In many ways, explainer content has become the snake eating its own tail: successful “thinkfluencers” increasingly end up posting about how you, too, could make thousands a month creating content or writing a Substack. The promise is that if you share enough thoughts online, you’ll eventually be rewarded. And fashion theorist Shuang Bright says the format is spreading beyond traditional creators, with brands and celebrities increasingly embracing the same modes of self-publishing. Even Kylie Jenner has floated the idea of starting a Substack. The issue, however, is that all of this exists on platforms that reward speed and consistency, often at the expense of depth. As Bright sees it, that pressure is also pushing some creators towards using AI to generate their scripts.

“To be constantly churning out thoughtful commentary or analysis is an oxymoron because you can’t be thoughtful quickly,” she says. “These short-form explainer videos are creating a facade of education, but the critique is that they’re only minutes long, so you can watch it and think, ‘OK, that was enriching; let’s move on to the next video’.” Bright herself creates videos about lesbian fashion history, preserving stories she couldn’t find elsewhere online, but often finds the explainer format limiting. If she goes over three minutes, for example, she says Instagram doesn’t push it out to the algorithm. “Because of that, there’s so much of the topic I’m not able to really flesh out,” she adds.

Explainer content is, of course, nothing new – how-to videos on everything from make-up to kissing to building furniture have existed on platforms like YouTube for years. What’s changed more recently, says Ruby Thelot, a designer and cyberethnographer, is the emergence of a hybrid between educational and entertaining content. He argues that this has been driven partly by a desire to feel more fulfilled by the time we spend on social media, as these platforms occupy ever more of our lives. “If previously [social media] allowed you to engage with fashion, beauty and the news, it makes sense that there could be a natural progression to ‘thought’,” he says. “People want to think. If they spend most of their time on their phones, they’ll want to think on their phones.”

At the same time as we’re all “thinking” on our phones, there’s a worsening literacy crisis, with reading scores continuing to fall among American students. In the US, this has coincided with increasingly fraught battles over education under Trump, from efforts to restrict race- and DEI-related programmes to cuts to federal funding for sex education initiatives. The rise of thinkfluencers, then, could be seen as young people attempting to take greater control over how they educate themselves and stay informed. As Thelot puts it: “People want to feel nourished, intellectually, spiritually, emotionally”. Even amid the slop articles and videos, this is what feels most hopeful about the trend – the fact that intellectual curiosity can become “cool” online feels striking at a time of declining trust in science and medicine, even if social media itself remains a major breeding ground for misinformation and is hardly conducive to sustained attention.

“If previously [social media] allowed you to engage with fashion, beauty and the news, it makes sense that there could be a natural progression to ‘thought’. People want to think. If they spend most of their time on their phones, they’ll want to think on their phones”

Agus Panzoni, head of culture strategy at trend and media platform Death to Stock (DTS), says she’s noticing knowledge-seeking becoming a social activity again. This includes lecture series, book clubs, poetry nights, libraries as hangout spots and bookstores becoming the new “it” spaces. “Intellectual life is becoming something you do with people, not just alone with a book,” she says. “People want to learn, yes, but also knowledge-seeking has become a site of belonging.” While critics might argue that one-minute explainers are replacing the books people pose alongside, Panzoni doesn’t see it that way: she believes this kind of content can serve as an introduction to new authors and ideas. (Although some people will undoubtedly stop at finding out why they experience limerence or having the plot of The Odyssey explained in 60 seconds or less.)

Panzoni says intellectual creators are making knowledge-seeking behaviour feel sexy right now (which might explain why, for a while, everyone online seemed to be referring to themselves as “thought daughters”). And, to give credit where it’s due, making complex ideas easily digestible is a genuine skill, and there are thinkfluencers explaining everything from mathematical concepts to runway references in inventive and accessible ways. “Many of the thinkfluencers, in all honesty, are both hot and smart!” says Thelot. “The existing formats (textbooks, lectures) found in school perhaps were not as compelling as an attractive person with a mic and cool edits.” The irony, of course, is that the same platforms making knowledge feel newly accessible often boost content from conventionally “hot” people – meaning even intellectual life isn’t entirely free from the internet’s beauty hierarchy.

All of this explainer content still exists on platforms where becoming the “face” of a fact, concept or opinion is often rewarded over citing sources, acknowledging past work or building transparently on the ideas of other authors, researchers and thinkers. My For You page, for example, has recently been feeding me explainer videos where the creator, tiny mic and all, flashes up a screenshot from an AI chatbot to substantiate an engagement-grabbing claim. Sometimes I recognise the article or research the chatbot appears to be drawing from; most of the time, I’m left completely in the dark about the years of work behind the idea. In the comments, meanwhile, people praise the shiny new messenger: “You’ve unlocked something in my brain”.

Shaad D’Souza, editor of the self-titled Shaad Magazine, recently captured the excess of thinkfluencers online with a post that read: “We don’t all have to be writers… Truthfully, most writing has an audience of exactly one”. Nor do we all have to perform being the smartest person online. If everyone is too busy churning out three thinkpieces or explainer videos a week, there will be no one left to practise the increasingly lost art of simply being a student. Because learning isn’t only about having something to say; it also requires the patience to sit with someone else’s ideas before turning them into your own. That means watching something until the final second or reading a piece right to the end – if you’re still here, you made it.