“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 nights had a shape to them, and that shape was The X-Files. FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, chasing aliens and government cover-ups and things that went bump in the night, every single week. The tagline that closed the opening credits, almost without fail, was “The Truth Is Out There.” Except when it wasn’t. Creator Chris Carter liked to swap it out when an episode had earned something different, and the swap everyone still remembers landed at the end of the Season 1 finale — right after Mulder’s informant, a shadowy guy who went only by Deep Throat, took a bullet and used his last breath to tell Scully, “Trust no one.”
Three words. They outlived the episode, outlived the season, outlived the decade. They show up on t-shirts now. And apparently, they show up in graduation blog posts written by a real estate lawyer in Lakewood Ranch, Florida, more than thirty years later.
Try living “trust no one” literally, though, and you’ll find out fast it’s terrible advice. A person who genuinely trusts nobody doesn’t come across as sharp or careful. He comes across as exhausting, and eventually alone. Worse, he’s usually the easiest guy in the room to fool, because trusting nothing on principle isn’t the same as having good judgment — it’s just suspicion with no filter, and suspicion with no filter gets exploited exactly as easily as blind faith does. It just fools you from the other direction.
So “trust no one” was never really the lesson, not even on the show that made it famous. If you want Mulder’s actual operating philosophy, don’t look at Deep Throat’s dying words. Look at the poster taped to the wall of his cluttered basement office: a grainy photo of a flying saucer, and underneath it, in blocky white letters, “I Want to Believe.”
That’s the real posture. Not blind trust, and not blanket suspicion — hope, paired with relentless questioning. Mulder wanted to believe, badly, and he still spent every episode chasing down evidence, cross-examining witnesses, and refusing to take anyone’s word for it, including his own government’s. The wanting and the checking worked together. Drop the checking and you’ve got a guy who believes anything. Drop the wanting and you’ve got a cynic who believes nothing and calls it wisdom. Keep both, and you’ve got someone who lets the truth earn his belief instead of assuming it either way. That’s really the whole point of this post, so hang onto it: keep your hope, keep your questions, and make the truth work for your belief.
Trust Is Doing You a Favor, Most of the Time
Before I talk you out of trusting things too easily, let me make the case for why you need trust in the first place.
You cannot personally verify everything you’re told. You’re not going to re-derive calculus before every math test, re-run someone else’s clinical trial before you take a prescription, or personally inspect a bridge’s engineering before you drive across it. At some point — a lot of points, every single day — you extend trust. To institutions. To credentials. To people who’ve demonstrated, over time, that they actually know what they’re talking about.
That’s how a society builds instead of starting from zero every generation — each of us inheriting what came before, checking what we reasonably can, and adding to it. Confidence in the messenger is what lets the message move forward. Take trust out of the equation entirely, and progress grinds to a halt, because nobody could ever get past re-verifying the basics.
The goal was never to withhold trust. The goal is to extend it well — to the sources that have earned it, in proportion to what they’ve actually earned.
The Con Is Always a Long Game
Which brings me to a character type we all claim to despise and, somehow, keep falling for anyway: the con man.
“Con man” is short for confidence man, and not because he’s got plenty of it. It’s because his entire scheme runs on acquiring yours. Nobody hands over their savings, or their vote, or their unquestioning belief, to a total stranger on day one. The con works by degrees — small, credible, likable interactions, stacked one on top of another, until eventually you trust the con man more than you trust your own gut. That’s the moment he’s been waiting for the whole time.
Now think about AI chatbots for a second. You ask a question, you get back a smooth, confident, well-organized answer. It sounds right. It’s pleasant to deal with. You ask again. It helps again. Slowly, without any single moment where you decided to, you stop evaluating what you’re being handed, because you’ve quietly come to trust the source.
None of that happens by accident. The companies building these tools aren’t charities. They’re some of the most valuable companies on earth, with investors to answer to and products to sell — and the product, in no small part, is your reliance. I’ll be fair about this: the tools themselves aren’t useless, and the people building them aren’t cartoon villains twirling mustaches somewhere. But your trust is valuable enough that it ought to be earned before it’s handed over, not the other way around — and not just because something answers politely and is available at 2 a.m.
“Consider the Source” — Remember That One?
The good news is, we already had a defense against exactly this. We’ve just misplaced it somewhere in the junk drawer.
Growing up, when you ran into a claim you weren’t sure about, the advice was “consider the source.” It meant something specific: before you accept what you’re being told, think about where it’s coming from. Does this person or outlet know what they’re talking about? Do they have a stake in your believing them? What’s their actual track record?
Somewhere along the way, that got swapped out for labels. “Fake news.” “Misinformation.” “Well, that’s from [Outlet], of course they’d say that.” A label does the opposite of what “consider the source” used to do — it lets you dismiss the message without ever engaging it, just by attacking whoever delivered it. That’s a cousin of the oldest fallacy in the book, the ad hominem, just scaled up from one person to an entire outlet or category of source. Discredit the vessel, and you never have to touch the cargo inside. And to be clear, this isn’t a habit that belongs to one side of anything — it gets used by everybody, on every side, whenever it happens to be convenient.
The Five Ws Still Work
So how do you actually put “consider the source” back into practice?
Go back to middle school English class: who, what, when, where, why. It was a writing tool. It also happens to be a pretty solid framework for living. Who is telling me this, and why? What’s their interest in my believing it? When did this information originate, and has anything changed since? Where did they get it from in the first place? Why am I hearing this, from this person, right now?
Run those five questions across anything that’s asking for your belief — a news article, a politician, a salesman, a chatbot, a friend who’s very sure of himself, me, writing this very post. Sometimes the source holds up fine. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, you did the work yourself, and the conclusion belongs to you.
Congratulations, Grads.
Using your brain — fully, deliberately, on purpose — isn’t optional. It’s an obligation you owe yourself, and it’s one you’ll owe the people who end up relying on your judgment someday: your future clients, your future kids, your future self at 2 a.m. wondering why you believed something so easily. Asking questions isn’t the opposite of believing in things. It’s what lets you believe in the right things, and get them right more often than not. Your conclusions should be yours. Your decisions should be yours. Nobody — not a con man, not a cable news anchor, not a chatbot, not even a well-meaning lawyer writing a blog post — gets to hand you a belief you didn’t check for yourself. 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 it has started to feel. Want to believe. Just make the truth earn it first.
Congratulations, Grads.
— Joe
