The Bullshit Era

LinkedIn is the social network I like least. It feels to me like a kind of shop window for people, where everyone puffs out their chest. I get it: you have to eat somehow, and positioning yourself as attractive based on what you do with your business life is what's going to open doors for you. Still, I get the feeling that everyone knows about the great hypocrisy this social network carries.

At least LinkedIn is something more serious, since it's not an entertainment platform, on paper.

Artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms are magnifying this to the point of absurdity; it's like there's some x of image you have to live up to, and to get there, people are willing to do anything.

What this is going to cause is an absolute saturation of what people perceive as valuable information: more and more content is empty content that adds nothing, and my feed looks more and more like the industrial production of the same kind of posts. And the worst part is that most of them weren't even generated by a person; at least I think most people can already smell it when they run into it. But it has one clear consequence:

In a few years you won't believe anything you read. Not this either.

I'm not saying everyone does it, I'm not saying everyone starts publishing AI slideshows to look like an AI expert. But everyone brags about their business "feats," people puff out their chests even for going to a talk, as if that made you the god of networking around here. Here are some examples of posts you've surely seen:

• "Today I had the pleasure of attending…"
• The photo with the speaker from the talk, as if they were best friends.
• The carousel of "10 prompts that…".
• Or the one with "50 artificial intelligence tools and what to use each of them for" (have you actually sat down and used all 50? Do you have the time? I don't).

Is any of these something where you're really showing that you know how to do something? Why do we do this?

That said, in this article I'm not going to preach at you, I'm not going to tell you to leave LinkedIn or stop posting. I'm going to tell you my remedy for this, and it's very simple. It has three legs:

• Why putting on appearances has stopped working.
• What selling really is (since that's what everyone's trying to do on this platform).
• The four things I do and the four I don't.

I. Lying is free

Basically, people believe they're something they're not. And the one who gets hurt most by this is you, because you're the first who, deep down, is going to know whether you're full of shit.

But why does this pattern keep repeating over and over, and on a mass scale at that?

It has one cause among many: everyone is so distracted that nobody does anything. We live very comfortable, distracted lives, and all the conveniences we have have made us useless. Everyone brags about knowing how to do things they've never done, just to look like they've done them so that others, who are doing exactly the same thing, will recognize them. This gives others a feeling of overwhelm that sets the cycle going again. Even those who notice the mechanism (and deep down everyone notices) get even more overwhelmed and keep contributing to it. I already said it a couple of articles ago: we try to keep up with the people who got stressed first.

Look, this isn't new: putting on appearances is in our DNA, we live off other people's recognition of x or y. What's changed is that now it's free; before, at least, you had to work at it a little. If you doubt it, take a look at your feed: with AI, putting on appearances no longer costs anything. An expert carousel, a post with data or a text that sounds deep can be manufactured in minutes without having done anything. And in March, in my first article, I put forward with data the figure that there's already more AI-generated content on the internet than the total generated in the history of humanity, in just the last year.

And that's not just my impression. Graphite, a content agency, analyzed 65,000 articles published on the internet between 2020 and 2025, and since around the end of 2024 about half of new articles have been written by AI. I encourage you to run this one through a detector. The study is signed by people who make their living from content, so they have some interest in it, but the same study found something else: 86% of what Google puts on top is still written by people.

Manufacturing is free. Getting read isn't.

The underlying problem is explained much better than I can by Yuval Noah Harari. In his book Nexus he basically says that truth is costly, complicated and often painful, while fiction is cheap, simple and can be made as attractive as you like.

Throughout history, lying well cost something. Now it costs nothing.

So when lying is free, proof is the only thing worth anything. Let's apply "I'll believe it when I see it."

And this, although it may not seem like it, is good news. If almost everyone is putting on appearances, the person who really does things can be spotted from a mile away. You don't need to be the best: it's enough to be able to show what you've done.

But first we have to answer the question from the beginning: what for?

II. What selling is

Like, seriously, people think others care in the slightest about what they do.

They don't.

Everyone cares about their own stuff: their problem, what they're missing, that's what motivates them.

Your talk, your photo with the speaker and your carousel mean absolutely nothing to them, unless they solve something for them. The thing is, if everyone posts it and nobody does anything, that carousel is worth as much as a piece of gum.

People only take action if they're motivated to, motivation is the lack of something, and for that you have to know how to sell.

What is selling?

Selling is getting a stranger to trust you to solve something they perceive as a problem. It's much easier if they're already aware of the problem, but if you're very good, you can make them realize they have a problem through your sales skill, which is nothing more than persuasive communication. PS: for this I highly recommend the book Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini. Really great.

Notice that nowhere in that definition does the word "bragging" appear.

Now, you can deceive people and you can win their trust by deceiving them. Or haven't you seen how much money the rented-Lambo internet gurus make? And it works, I'm not going to lie to you. Some people get rich that way, because we want it all now.

But there's a detail that David Ogilvy, one of the most influential advertising men of the twentieth century, wrote down in 1963 in Confessions of an Advertising Man: if you lie about a product, you'll get caught. Either by the government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying from you a second time.

The guru sells once. The second purchase is the one that can't be faked.

The thing is, if you create a business, you have to accept that if you don't want to be full of shit, the best thing is to sell with the truth, which, it turns out, I'm convinced, is what sells best.

Nobody buys your feats. They buy you solving their problem.

III. 2D and 3D

And how do I sell with the truth? By giving yourself evidence that you have it.

How the fuck do you expect to tell people to trust you if you don't trust yourself?

And how do you trust yourself? By giving yourself evidence.

This is where something I call 2D and 3D experiences comes in.

A 2D experience is what you've read, what you've seen others do, what you talk about. A 3D experience is what you've done with your own hands, with what it cost you and the mistakes you made along the way. It's like the photo of a house and the house: from the front they look very much alike, but as soon as you walk around it, the photo falls over.

With 2D you can only put on appearances. With 3D you have evidence, and you don't need to pretend anything.

Think of two people talking about sales. One has read ten books on how to sell. The other has made a hundred calls to people who didn't know them at all. Both can give you a talk.

Only one can teach you something.

Let me give you my example. 48 days ago I started uploading a video a day of between 3 and 7 minutes talking to camera without a single cut. I already explained why back then: the only goal was to teach my nervous system that nothing happens if things go badly and, while I was at it, to develop my ability to talk to the camera for what's coming, besides documenting the process of building my company. I know perfectly well that nobody is going to watch a 7-minute video explaining the project's daily progress, but I'm accumulating evidence, and putting my goals ahead of proving anything to anybody.

No book gave me that. 48 videos gave me that, one after another.

Now think about you. Of everything you talk about, on LinkedIn, in an interview or in a meeting, how much is 2D?

You don't have to fix it all. Pick just one thing you talk about and have never done.

This week, either you do it or you stop talking about it.

Trust isn't asked for, it's accumulated. First in yourself, then in others.

IV. What I do and what I don't

So let me tell you what I do. And yes, this is marketing too. The difference is that you can check it.

What I do

• I cite the primary source. When I published my company's manifesto, the first thing I asked was that, instead of reading me, people go to the primary authors of those ideas. I still ask that.
• I show the proof. When I said I had written 52 pages without AI, I attached the screenshots. When I said what I'm building would have cost me about 3 million euros a few years ago, I put the screen recording in The Genie in the Lamp.
• I say what I don't know. In Boredom Overdose I wrote, literally, "this is a bet of mine, not a data point." I'd rather you read that from me than in a comment.
• I document the ugly parts too. When I published the manifesto's numbers, I said that almost all the interactions came from my friends and that I'd earned my first hater.

What I don't do

• Puff out my chest for going to a talk.
• Publish AI carousels to look like an expert.
• Brag about knowing how to do things I've never done.
• Pass off other people's work as mine.

When I published those numbers I wrote: "I'm not telling you this to brag about anything, I'm still a nobody, but I want the process to be documented." I still think the same way.

Documenting what you do isn't bragging. Bragging is showing the pretty result, because you think you have to be perfect in other people's eyes; documenting is showing the whole process, for whoever finds it useful.

But let me tell you a secret: the biggest beneficiary of that story you're putting together is you. You'll know you're not full of shit.

My strategy

So now you know my marketing strategy: selling by telling the truth, and showing it to people in a persuasive way.

But hey, like I told you at the beginning, don't believe this either.

In a few years you won't believe anything; maybe that's not so bad.

The day nobody believes anything, the only person who'll sell is the one who can show it.

So don't believe me. Check it: click on the links in the article, count the videos on my account with 54 followers, look up the references.

Distrust isn't a problem; it's your greatest tool, unfortunately.

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Written in Spanish by Álvaro Molina and first published on Substack (original). English translation with AI. Quotations from English-language sources are translated back from the Spanish unless marked otherwise, so their wording may differ from the original.