Several years ago, videos online of events from real life were, to a large degree, something we could take as a source of truth. The cost of faking videos was simply too high for most.

But we already knew to take any kind of written text with a grain of salt, because that’s where the cesspool of human opinion showed up, and that has been a reality we have had to deal with all throughout history. History is written by the victors, as they say.

Today, however, everything that is online can be faked. My voice can be cloned, as can my likeness. Anyone can pretend to be me or you or anyone in the world. The cost of creating fake content is zero. And there is no way to tell the difference anymore.

Believe nothing

It is time to flip your epistemological stance. What you once considered digital evidence no longer implies truth. It only implies computational expenditure. A probabilistic truth in the vast ocean of endless information. Anything that can be faked will be faked.

So you start from zero trust. Not cynicism. Tactical nihilism.

Trust zero information by default. Not journalists, not governments, not scientists, not eyewitness videos, not even your own eyes or ears in real time. Not even your favourite AI.

Most people will pick a tribe and outsource their opinions and beliefs to someone they trust because this is the easy way out and has always been. If you become one of them, you will be farmed.

Believing nothing protects you from deception.

Assume everything

Believing nothing involves assuming that everything can be either true or false. But you need a reliable way to handle the explosion of possibilities without descending into chaos.

This is where critical thinking, probabilistic thinking, and game theory become your most important tools.

Instead of thinking about something as true or false, start treating every scenario as a spectrum of probabilities and try to understand what game the sharer is playing and what their incentive is.

You need to deliberately expand your mental models to encompass the full spectrum of what could be, no matter how improbable it might be.

This keeps you grounded, adaptable, and ready to pivot, turning overwhelming uncertainty into manageable decisions or deliberate indecision. Sometimes just being aware is enough. You do not have to have an opinion on everything in the world.

How to Apply This Mindset Daily

The key is to question everything through the lenses of probability and incentives.

Ask yourself

• What’s the likelihood this is real, manipulated, or flat-out fake?

• And what might the sharer gain from it?

This isn’t about paranoia, it’s about building resilience in a world you can’t trust.

What is the probability that...

• Your friend won a lottery, and they message you about it on WhatsApp, and they want to give you money? Or that their account is hacked? Lottery wins are rare, hacks are common.

• Your kid sends you a text from a friend’s phone saying they lost their phone and wallet, and asks if you can wire some money to your friend? Or is that a scammer? Family emergencies are classic scam tactics. Call them directly on a known number to confirm.

• The video you just watched about a dog and a small kid in the corner, both looking ashamed, is real? Or was it generated to farm your attention for money because the poster makes money for each view? Cute animal videos go viral easily. AI-generated content is cheap to produce. Views generate money.

What game are they playing?

• Are they trying to make money at any cost? Clickbait headlines are designed to maximise ad revenue, regardless of accuracy.

• Are they trying to sell you on an opinion, and if so, what is the benefit of doing that? Think tanks publish reports favouring certain policies.

• A viral social media post claims a celebrity has died, complete with photos and quotes from “sources”? Or that it’s a hoax spread for clicks, shares, and ad revenue?

• Virality drives traffic, drive and revenue. Death hoaxes are low-effort ways to game algorithms.

• Wellness influencers often partner with brands or sell their own retreats. One cannot help feeling that consuming one’s own urine as a tonic is a course of action marginally less advisable.

Can AI be the arbiter of truth?

Not really. But by designing AI with truth-seeking in mind, it is more likely to give you answers that have a higher probability of being true.

This is, in fact, one of the most common uses of Grok on X, to verify the legitimacy of information. Did you take this claim of mine for granted, or did you question it? I actually have no idea.

According to Gapminder, AI is 85,9% correct in their worldview test with AI models from late 2024 - mid 2025. And humans score a whooping 23%.

It turns out that our knowledge of the world is rather less comprehensive than we like to suppose; probabilities, therefore, seem the more civilised alternative to dogmatic certainty.

If you have loved ones that moved away that you wish to understand better or you wish move abroad yourself, here is a glimpse into our souls.

A life in the diaspora is a life of dichotomy.

• The feeling of being alone, even tho we may not actually be alone, is overwhelming.

• We will never fully feel at home where we moved to and we will no longer feel home, at home.

• The forever split heart, after having lived in two countries and loving and missing people in both places but only being able to be in one place, is absolutely heartbreaking.

  • Particularly the guilt when people we deeply care about die and we were not there to say goodbye.

  • And even if we would move back home, the heart is split forever and it will never be whole.

  • But our heart has grown.

• To survive we have to embrace change. Circumstances force us into seeing the world from multiple cultural views so we are bound to question our own. And therefor, yours too.

• The expectations from back home, spoken or unspoken, weighs us down and over time creates resentment between us. We have to carry your expectations. You don’t.

• The daily grief we go through, from having left and not being part of life back home, is exceptionally hard to carry.

• We chose a new life at the cost of leaving everyone we love behind. That was incredibly hard. This broke our heart and we know we broke yours too. And for that we are deeply sorry.

  • But if you know us deeply and love us, you understand and know why we had to go. And you are happy and grateful for us that we get to build a new life, even if you are hurt and sad we left and that you don’t get to have us around.

  • And if you are angry at us for leaving and you ask us to move home, it hurts us. It hurts because we know we cause you constant paint for having left. It also hurts because we know that you never really knew us and are unable to be happy for us. And we keep on carrying that pain because we love you, but deep down we just wish you would be happy for us.

• You carry the absence of us, but we carry the absence of all of you.

• You have absolutely no idea how much we miss you.

• We carry all of this pain on top of having to build a new life.

But all of this pain is worth it because we have a dream.

A dream of a better life.

A life we could never have dreamed of if we had not moved.

I think about most things from a physics perspective and I encourage you to do the same if you do not already do so.

These principles are learnings I've gathered from other people and my own observations. I start at the very high level so you get the fundamentals of the knowledge tree and can build up from there. It may feel a bit esoteric at the start but I encourage you to read it through.

I hope you'll find some of these helpful.

Everything is governed by systems

The world we live in is governed by systems, whether it’s natural systems that evolved before us or systems humans have built. All systems, are built on top of layers of other underlying systems.

First we have physics that is at the core. It sets hard limits to what can be achieved so if you want to innovate and solve problems it’s immensely useful to have basic understanding of physics. If you want to build a product that breaks the laws of physics your product has failed before you start building it.

Second is nature. If nature can do it, so can we. We just might not be aware of how many cycles of innovation we have to go through before we can achieve the results nature has already achieved.

Third are all the systems humans have built. The reason you can read this is because humans have invented countless systems that enable you to. Everything from language to computers.

We collect energy to fight entropy

Everything in the universe has a natural inclination to slide into a state of maximum chaos or disorder, like a room that gets messier unless you clean it up. That’s what physics calls entropy.

So from the lens of physics we are organisms that collect energy to fight entropy.

Before all our innovations the human life expectancy was around 20-30 years. Thanks to all the systems we have invented and innovated on over the centuries, we have managed to increase the life expectancy up to 85 in countries with most developed systems and as low as 60 in countries with least developed systems and there is no such things as a low-energy high income country.

The larger systems we build around us the more energy we need to collect to maintain and keep that system away from sliding towards entropy.

Optimizing time and energy to get a job done

Innovation is the process of optimizing the time and energy it takes to get a job done.

Looking at innovation thru the lens of physics helps us identify opportunities for innovation at any scale. We build products to help us get a job done. When we use those products, we offload the time and energy consumed over to that product, freeing up more time and energy for us to do other things. And that’s how products and technology become a productivity multiplier for humans.

Invention starts with a high amount of time and energy spent on the invention which then unlocks new jobs or new ways to do existing jobs. This is followed by multiple cycles of innovation where we optimize the time and energy to get that job done until we reach a point of optimal optimization.

If you can reduce the time or energy it takes to get a job done by a meaningful amount, you can unlock tremendous value.

Layers of abstractions

Everything that we have built in the past are just layers of abstractions of problems that have been solved.

Have you ever thought about all of the things that had to be invented just so you can read this while you're taking a shit?

Language, the wheel, smelting, paper, compass, printing press, plumbing, flush toilet, electricity, telephone, computer, internet, mobile phone.

And it's not even a finite list. And all of them still require energy.

Humans can only deliver 1X productivity

Humans are only capable of delivering 1X of productivity. So when it comes to our contribution to a system, we can never exceed 1X. We can however use energy and technology to increase our productivity.

Imagine that we have a job that requires 100x of productivity and that equals to 100kWh of electricity and that a human can only contribute 1kWh. Then you can either get it done with 100 humans or you can build technology that is going to get much of the job done automatically which then becomes our productivity multiplier.

Most systems that we build require some kind of human intervention. Meaning that we will always contribute some energy to the system to get the job done.

If we are asked to get the job done for someone else they would need to pay us at the very minimum 100kWh of electricity. Energy can not be destroyed, it can only be transmuted.

• Human gets 1kWh

• System gets 99kWh

In reality we would want to get a surplus of energy paid so that we can reduce the rate of entropy for both the human and the system and to keep innovating.

The larger the system, the less we contribute. How we distribute the surplus is up to us.

Money is Economic Energy

In the early days of human interaction, trade was straightforward: physical goods for physical goods. Two apples might fetch you an orange, or a goat could be exchanged for a set of tools. This was a direct exchange of energy embodied in the goods themselves.

But as societies grew more complex, the need for a more efficient trading system arose. Here, money entered as an abstraction of energy. Money is not just a medium of exchange; it acts as a reference to future expenditure of energy. It’s a promise that when you use this money, you will receive an equivalent amount of energy back in the form of goods or services.

This abstraction allows for a more fluid and scalable economic system, where energy can be traded in countless ways without the need for direct barter, making economic interactions more efficient and increasing the rate of innovation.

Exponential Growth and S-Curves

Understanding exponential growth and S-curves is important for innovation, yet it remains elusive to our linear-thinking minds.

This phenomenon, often misunderstood, is characterized by a rate of change that increases over time. It’s not just about getting bigger; it’s about getting bigger at an ever-accelerating pace.

Exponential growth in innovation tends to follow the S-Curve. It starts of slowly and then takes off and tapers off at the end. Once you hit the 1% of the S-Curve you are only 7-10 doublings away from reaching a 100%.

Ray Kurzweil is famous not only for his innovation but also for his future predictions by identifying exponential growth curves across industries

Moore’s Law says that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles roughly every two years, leading to exponential growth in computing power.

Social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp all benefit from Metcalfe’s Law. The more users they have, the more valuable they become to each individual user.

Companies that understand these dynamics can design products or services to ride the wave of exponential growth.

Recognizing and harnessing exponential growth and S-curves isn’t just about understanding a mathematical concept; it’s about understanding the rhythm of innovation, where timing, scale, and foresight are the keys to success.