“Dear Grads” is a series I publish each spring for high school graduates. Consider it unsolicited advice from a lawyer who has been around long enough to know a few things — and young enough to still remember what it felt like not to.
Growing up in the 1990s, Friday night television was a ritual. And for a good stretch of those years, Friday night meant one thing: The X-Files.
For the uninitiated, the show followed FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigated paranormal phenomena, government conspiracies, and all manner of things that went bump in the night. The official tagline — the phrase that flashed at the end of every opening credits sequence — was “The Truth Is Out There.” But occasionally, when the story called for it, the show’s creator Chris Carter would swap it out. The most memorable substitution came at the end of the Season 1 finale, right after Mulder’s informant, a shadowy figure known only as Deep Throat, lay dying and whispered his final words to Scully: “Trust no one.” Those three words replaced the tagline that episode. They’d appear again, selectively, across the series whenever the moment earned them.
What Trust Actually Does for Us
Trust, properly placed, is enormously practical.
You cannot personally verify everything you have ever been told. You cannot re-derive calculus from scratch before every math class, re-run every clinical trial before you take a medication, or personally audit every financial statement before you make an investment. At some point, you extend trust — to institutions, to credentials, to track records, to sources with demonstrable expertise. That’s how a functioning society operates.
We build on knowledge. Each generation inherits the accumulated learning of those who came before, verifies what’s verifiable, and adds to it. Trust in that system is what makes progress possible. Confidence in the messenger instills trust in the message. Without it, we start from zero every single time. Without it, we cannot build.
But that trust has to be earned and maintained. The moment we extend it blindly, we’ve handed the keys to whoever is willing to pretend they deserve them. And the list of pretenders seems to be growing more, each day. Which is the impetus for this blog post.
The Con Is Always Playing the Long Game
Let me introduce you to a guy who we all hate in concept but who we probably adore in real life. I’m speaking of the con man, the age old duper of dupes, robber of things, trickster after your wallet.
Did you know? “Con man” is short for confidence man. And it’s not because he’s brimming with bravado. No, it’s because his entire operation runs on gaining your confidence. Your trust. Your belief that he is exactly who he says he is.
The con doesn’t work on day one. It takes time. Incremental credibility. Small demonstrations of reliability, stacked on top of each other, until one day you trust the con man more than your own instincts. That’s when he makes his move.
Now think about AI chatbots.
You ask a question, you get a smooth, confident, well-organized answer. It sounds authoritative. It sounds reasonable. You use it again. It helps again. You start to default to it. It laughs when you’re witty. And somewhere along the way, without anyone announcing it, you’ve stopped evaluating what you’re being given — because you’ve come to trust the source.
The frictionless, satisfying experience is by design. The companies building these tools are not doing it out of civic virtue. They are trillion-dollar enterprises with investors, products, and agendas. And the product, in no small part, is your reliance on them. Your questions. Your habits. Your trust. One pleasant interaction at a time.
“Consider the Source” — Remember That?
The good news is that we already have a defense against this kind of thing. We’ve had it for generations. We just seem to have misplaced it.
Growing up, one of the most common pieces of advice I heard when encountering information I wasn’t sure about was: consider the source. The phrase meant something specific. Before you accept something as true, think about where it’s coming from. Does this person have relevant expertise? Do they have a stake in what they’re telling you? What’s their track record? It invited you to do a little due diligence on the messenger before you bought the message.
We used to hear ‘consider the source.’ Now we hear labels: ‘fake news,’ ‘misinformation,’ or ‘that’s from _________, of course they’d say that.’ Labels short-circuit scrutiny. That’s a cousin of the ad hominem fallacy — discredit the vessel, and you never have to engage the cargo.
Consider the source was an invitation to think. Labels are an order to stop thinking. One requires you to do a little work before forming a conclusion. The other hands you the conclusion and tells you the work has already been done by people you trust… by those who hold your confidence.
Who, What, When, Where, Why
So how do we put consider the source back to work?
The five Ws: who, what, when, where, why. You learned them in a middle school English class as a framework for writing. They work just as well as a framework for living. Who is telling me this, and why? What is their interest in my believing it? When did this information originate, and is it still accurate? Where does this source get its own information? Why am I being told this, right now, in this way?
Run those questions across anything that’s asking for your belief — a news article, a politician, a salesman, a chatbot, a friend who is very sure about something, me — and you will find that the picture sharpens considerably. Sometimes the source holds up. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, you’ve done the thinking yourself, and the conclusion is yours.
Your brain has an obligation. To you, to the people you love, and to the rest of us. That obligation is to ask questions. The questions don’t make you difficult. They make you a functioning, independent adult who is capable of making up your own mind — which is, when you think about it, the whole point. You don’t want to outsource your judgment to a chatbot programmed by a company you know nothing about, for purposes that haven’t been disclosed to you. Your conclusions should be yours. Your decisions should be yours. That power belongs to you, and it’s worth protecting.
So trust carefully. Believe thoughtfully. And consider the source — every single time, regardless of how familiar and friendly they are starting to feel.
Congratulations, Grads.
— Joe
