The first things humans invented, before fire, the wheel or baked brie, was trust.
Trusting the others in the village. Trusting that you could get a good night’s sleep. Trusting that what you heard was true.
We’ve expanded the village from twenty people to billions. Walter Cronkite was effective because millions of people trusted him, and he earned that trust. And as the media became more powerful and fragmented, that contract began to erode.
We’ve created methods of exchange and interaction that were unimaginable just a generation ago.
And, at the same time that we’ve expanded our circles of trust, we’ve pushed to make many of them digital.
Interactions by email and zoom. Documents that are written and certified by unseen intermediaries. Stories and images that feel real and local, but might be neither one.
This only works because we’ve applied our same 20-person trust instincts to each of these interactions, billions of times, around the world.
Aided by AI, the thieves and scammers are now relentlessly working to hack this basic human instinct. They’re stealing more than money.
That email might not be from the person you think it’s from. And that online recruiter, or the text you just got–it might not be worthy of the benefit of the doubt. Even phone calls from people who aren’t who they say they are–AI bots with familiar voices and plenty of specific knowledge.
Like all things amplified by computer chips and the network, this one is going to accelerate–very quickly.
People are going to be deceived, victimized and ripped off. And the sort of intimacy that marketers and institutions counted on will erode fairly quickly.
Halloween is here, and it’s not just little kids who are wearing costumes. If someone in a clown mask walks into a bank, the tellers know something’s up… trust is the first thing to go.
The short-term response is to change our bias about digital interactions–when in doubt, be more human. When in doubt, take your time. When in doubt, ask someone else to double check.
In the long run, I think we’re going to see our circles of trust shrinking. That’s sad, it’s going to fracture networks we’ve been counting on for a long time and it’s going to be confusing since the defaults will be shifting.
Marketers will discover the costs of this, but it’s individuals that will have to rebuild what they think of as community.
When we’re a little behind, we borrow to catch up.
Perhaps we borrow goodwill and spend less time than we might on a project.
Or we need some money to pay the rent, so we borrow against a paycheck.
And a good night’s sleep is tempting to borrow from as well.
The borrowing compounds, with small debts turning into bigger ones.
On the other hand, when we’re a little ahead, we’re not charged interest, we earn it.
The slack in our workday gives us a chance to plan, to do work on our own account and to see the big picture.
The difference between behind and ahead often comes down to how much we’ve promised the world. If our apartment is too expensive, our customer list is too big or our social media platform is hard to keep up with, it’s easy to fall a bit behind.
This is under our control.
Overdelivering on smaller promises is a shortcut to trust, loyalty and resilience.
So many bits of information are flying around. Emails to us, articles, posts, videos, updates, memos, meetings, books…
The most common (and apparently efficient) approach is to quickly look over the new information. If it confirms what you already know, check it off. If it contradicts what you believe, find a reason to ignore it.
The alternative is to take new information and try it on for size. Have it change your mind. Imagine what happens if the information is actually true and useful. Not a checkbox confirmation, but actually a new way to see things.
Visitors to your new bookstore are likely to have a phone in their pockets–they could buy a book from the competition without even walking into the shop.
And diners at your funky restaurant have to pass dozens of other places to eat on their way to you. Places that are faster, more conventional and probably cheaper as well.
Good, fast and cheap used to be the goals of a typical small business. Today, there’s probably a giant, heartless competitor who is gooder, faster and cheaper than you.
The way forward is simple: Be worth the trip. Be worth the price.
“You can pick anyone, and we’re anyone” isn’t going to be helpful going forward. Be someone instead.
Racing to the bottom is no longer a viable option, but it’s more compelling and useful to race to the top than ever before.
It’s possible to consider the next event in our lives as something the world is trying to teach us.
But it might be even more effective to realize that, whenever we choose, we can learn something from what’s going on. We’re not getting taught, we’re choosing to learn. There’s a lesson in every interaction, if we want there to be.
When we choose to learn, our active participation makes a difference.
If there was a website you could visit to find out what the future held, how often would you visit it?
We do that with the weather, sometimes daily.
People are drawn to breaking news and social media buzz because they have an urge to know the now, which is a bit like the future, except it already happened.
One alternative is to spend that time and energy inventing the future instead. There are countless things we can do today to change tomorrow.
It’s difficult to spend the entire day working on outcomes. Sooner or later, there are tasks to be done, tasks we believe will get us to the outcome we seek.
But it’s easy to spend the whole day on tasks, failing to recalibrate and ignoring the fact that the tasks might not be helping us get the results we set out to create in the first place.
October 22, 2025
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