Why People Follow Fake Experts Instead of Real Ones?

Why Fake Experts Win Online (and How Real Pros Can Compete Ethically)

In this episode of The Expert’s Journey, Brad and Dixie explore why fake experts often draw bigger online audiences than genuine professionals, arguing that confidence, certainty, and strong marketing frequently outperform real experience. 

They discuss how gurus hide incompetence through short-form content, teams, ghostwriting, and AI, and how audiences confuse absolutes and simplicity with expertise while real experts add nuance that can sound less convincing. 

The conversation highlights emotion-driven buying, vanity metrics like views, and examples of questionable claims in internet marketing, publishing programs, crypto, and coaching, emphasizing the need to research track records via LinkedIn, evidence, and even AI cross-checking. 

The Expert’s Journey podcast is dedicated to empowering authors, content creators, experts and professional speakers worldwide.

Join hosts Brad Hauck, author of AI Powered Profits: Use AI to Automate & Accelerate Your Business in 90 Days, and Dixie Carlton, author of Start With the Draft: How to Easily Plan and Write a Non-Fiction Book, as they share practical insights to elevate your speaking career.

Each episode delivers actionable strategies to grow your audience, sharpen your skills, and increase your impact through speaking, publishing, and smart marketing.

Whether you're looking to boost your influence or explore new ways to share your expertise, The Expert’s Journey gives you the tools and direction to succeed.

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Brad Hauck Proficlix.com.au
Dixie Carlton Indieexpertspublishing.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Experts Journey podcast where we're all about creating your path to impact. Join your hosts, Dixie, Mary Carlton from Indie Experts Publishing, and Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Howe, as we look at how you can grow your business and influence by leveraging your knowledge for profit. Welcome to the Experts Journey. So why do fake experts often attract bigger audiences than real professionals? In today's online world, confidence, certainty and strong marketing can absolutely outperform genuine experienced. In this episode, we're going to unpack why audiences follow gurus, how real experts accidentally make themselves harder to understand, and why ethical leaders can learn from it without becoming fake themselves. Good morning, Dixie. Good morning, Brad. What a fascinating topic. I know it's a particular passion of yours and I'm looking forward to this conversation because we can uncover some interesting stuff. Yeah, there's a lot to cover here because we do see a lot of this in the market, especially online, because everybody's an instant expert on TikTok or on Instagram or wherever. And you've got to question the experience level when you see a 19 year old saying that they made $14 billion last year. I mean, aside from the fact that the numbers don't hold up and their age tells me they haven't got the experience. I mean, I know, don't get me wrong, I do understand that some influencers do have good incomes in that realistically, probably, I reckon 95% of the claims you see online would be highly suspect. I have to agree with you because we are constantly seeing people who can tell you how to do everything, but I don't think I'm necessarily seeing the things that back that up. And often they don't stay around for very long. No, it's very much get the money and get out. They reproduce someone else's work, sell it off as their own, take the money and move on. And one thing I have noticed over the years, because I've been on Internet marketing since 93, so I have seen the top marketers in the world, I've worked with them, I know many of them, and I've watched all the other people come and go as we go along, and I've watched them switch from one thing to another just to follow the money chain and all that. But I've also seen thousands of them just disappear off the face of the earth. One moment everyone's talking about them, next moment they're gone. Yes. Which is interesting. I mean, there's obviously been a rise in things like even the use of ghostwriters and people to write this stuff for you and people who can use others to front for them. And of course, obviously, AI plays a big role into that as well. When it's not your own brilliant content, or if it's not something that you have fully invested in learning over a period of time, then how can you say that you're an expert who has the expertise to teach it to everybody else anyway? Very unusual for someone to, as you say, having had the longevity as an adult, even to be able to comprehensively have tested and worked out the methodology, to be able to share it and have it reach millions. Absolutely. And one thing I will say is that people who are online have the ability to hide their incompetence because you're only seeing them in small chunks and you might. The longest piece of video you might see from them is half an hour. They can keep up the facade very easily because you're not actually going to meet them face to face in a room. You're not going to work one on one with them because they don't do that. Everything they sell is a book, a course, a video or whatever. It's never actually worked like go and spend time in a room with them. If you, you might have one out of 10,000 that actually will be in front of someone. And so because of that, you can actually hide behind the content itself. And if you get a good team of content producers, they can make you look like a million dollars. Yeah. From very little quality content. Because as I've written here, confidence looks like competence. Yes. Many audiences mistake certainty for expertise. Fake experts speak in absolutes. They simplify everything and they rarely admit doubt. Real experts tend to add nuance, exceptions and contexts which can sound less convincing, but it's not. It's the truth. There was a famous speaker in the professional speakers industry a few years ago called Winston Marshall. Marshall. Yes. And he used to. He was famous for saying, be a better marketer of what you do than a doer of what you do. And he spoke about marketing and to some degree he's right. But that's actually become a really bad way to look at what you're doing for yourself. If you're following that line of thinking, you're not actually able to deliver on the quality that you are proposing that you can deliver on. If you are just a better marketer of what you do than a doer of what you do. And so I think over the last 20 years, since I first heard him say that, I've rethought that many times, and I think that's partly the Crux of the problem is that too many people in the last 10, 20 years have been hearing that same kind of comment and thinking, well, as long as I'm good at the marketing, it doesn't matter if I'm good at the delivery. That's true. And the fact of the matter is it does make money. Marketing is about making money, and so it proves itself to be true. But on the other hand, do you want longevity? And if you want longevity, well, things change over time. So you can keep up a facade. You can be the greatest in the world for a short amount of time. It's very hard to keep that going over 10, 15, 20 years from being in your business for a long time. It's very hard to keep a business going. It takes a lot of work. And so to keep up that sort of energy and that sort of front, it requires huge teams of people. Because you're actually using their energy to present yourself. Yes. You only have to turn it on for this much, and then they make it look like everywhere for the next six months. And it's really only two minutes of you actually being energetic. I come across this a lot where every second person sometimes says, I'll help you write your book, or there's so many book programs out there and people offering ways to become a bestseller and to get more leverage on your book, and things like that people have never, ever heard of. Now, just because I've never heard of them doesn't mean that they're not legitimate. But if they've only done two or three books, then how do they have that level of expertise? You see also people saying, well, I write this classic one going around at the moment. I've written however many dozens of books, and I've done that all this year. 65 books so far this year. And I earned this much from this many blah, blah, blah, opportunities to sell them, et cetera, on Amazon. And I'm a multimillionaire now, but all my books are online as pseudonyms. No one knows who I am. I just write them as not being me. And I'm thinking, well, there's no validity in that. How on earth could anyone ever fact check the fact that you have done this? Oh, absolutely. And I see that in the Internet marketing world because every month there's a new guru comes out. Whether they're on YouTube, they're getting all the views on there, or whether it's. They're speaking at conferences or whatever. There's always these gurus. And people used to say to me, why don't you do that? And I'm like, because I can, but I won't. I said, I know what they're saying is not true. When they get on stage and they say you can make $1,000 in the next seven days. Well, yes, that is possible. I get that the statement's possible. The fact of the matter is I've got, I'm looking around the room and a group of people who can't build a website and they want to make $1,000 building a website in the next seven days. Well, it's basically impossible because it can't be done or couldn't be done then. Now, obviously with AI, you can speed things up, but the point is, even if you get the website, you've got to get the visitors. And out of the visitors, the numbers tell me that one out of a thousand buyers or whatever, it just doesn't work. And people don't question it because of the confidence of the person who's presenting the information. And they're very believable. And they make it simple and they make it look really simple. But on often the one thing that always gets me is the fact that they say, now you just need to do this. And it's like a simple step, like create a website. Now that sounds simple, as I said before, but that is not a simple process. That's by a domain, by hosting. You've got to set up a content management system, you've got to do the website. You know, all those steps that people would have had to have done. And 10 years ago that was an extremely difficult, complex task, but they put it into one step and make it look like it's the easiest thing in the world because they're a five step plan. Yeah, I had an interesting experience this week, so I've just, I'm just in the process of launching an app which supports my book, Start with the Draft. Now, I'm using software to create it and I was demonstrating it to a couple of my author clients the other day and we were just having a conversation and the comment came up that, yes, it's all very well to create this and use these products, but unless you know what the prompts are, unless you have the background product that supports what you're creating, which for me, obviously the start with the draft book, although it was written, what, two years ago and was probably in its written iteration maybe for six months before that, the reality is that's taken 10 years or more to develop the content to write the book about. So everything that's gone onto this app that literally only took me two or three days to create and was done with the help of huge amounts of technical support. The reality is that if you don't know what it is that you're trying to create and the purpose that it has and the prompts to put in and the expectations of how it's going to be used from the user's perspective, then you cannot create something. So when you're hearing about people saying, oh, on stage, do this, create a website, et cetera, I'm hearing people all the time telling me, well, AI can create a whole website now, yeah, fantastic. But does it actually serve the purpose that you think it's serving? Because if you are not an expert in that space, regardless of how good you think it looks and how flashy and fabulous it looks, it's never going to serve the purpose for which you're creating it, because there are so many moving paths that you still need to get right. Everything from how do you get your signups, how do you then keep people engaged, how do you follow through with the post usage, delivery and customer service? There's so many moving parts and. Absolutely, yeah. It's just this mindfab that everybody thinks, well, I'm going to step onto this mindfield and I now have the map for where to go and how to do it and how to dodge the dodgy bits. And it's going to be so easy and I'm just going to be buying myself a Ferrari for Christmas. Why? Far from you? Yeah, exactly. And look, these people, they trade on emotion, let's face it. So people will buy on emotion over evidence every day of the week. And gurus often sell transformation and status and all that better than genuine experts do. The reason we come up with the term con man or con woman is because confidence. And so it's true, we don't use that term anymore. We tend to say, you know, that they're very confident or they're great at selling and all that, but actually the real term is con man, and that's what most of them are doing. And you're being conned. You need to ask yourself, what's this person's track record? Is this the first time you've ever heard of them around the room? You'll soon find out if this person is like, brand new on the scene and whether they've actually done what they've said they've done. Because before you hand over $10,000 to someone for a course or whatever, it happens to be, go to your research, like, seriously, because it sounds great. It gets the emotion going in you and your hopes there, and you really want it to work for you. And you're desperate, too, a lot of times, because you're really at a point where you need something to break through, and it's. You're willing to borrow money. I mean, I was watching a video recently where they're interviewing people about a course, and in fact, it was on ABC News for tradies. So it was a course for tradies to help them grow their businesses, but in the end, they were selling a course about how to grow their business. That's how they were making their money. They weren't actually growing their business from what they did in the course. They. And the content that was in the course was so generic. It's been around since I can't remember when. And they were borrowing $10,000 to do the course. Wow. Because they really wanted to do better, and I totally understand that. But it is a confidence game. There is heaps of shysters, shucksters, con men, whatever you want to call them. Yeah. And they will call themselves gurus and experts these days. It's interesting, too. I was driving yesterday, so I was listening to a really good audiobook on that touched on this particular subject. Sometimes it's a matter of how much money you invest in yourself to make yourself look good. So if you have so much money that you can drive the BMW, you wear the Armani suits, and everything looks so slick and fabulous, baby. Then, yeah, you're gonna look like you are successful enough to be able to pull off the confidence strip. The audiobook I was listening to yesterday was talking about Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme guy. And the guy who brought him down effectively was someone who had gone into talking to all of the traders in New York and Boston and the area that he was familiar with, the trading network. And no one at the point that he was starting to investigate, no one was dealing with him. And he said, my backup was alerted, because you cannot be possibly making that kind of money and doing those kind of returns if you're not actually trading with at least some of these people. And if he's not trading with anyone, then where's the money coming from? He said that was the first tip off, that if he was dealing with doing a lot of business with people who were in Europe, and that's how he managed to pull the ball over so many people's eyes. Now, when you think about the gurus that we're following or that we're seeing Et Cetera. So many of them have stepped well outside of their own location or their own industry or their. Wherever their reputation may have been in the past, because they're just looking for a new greenfield. The ones that are actually worth having a good look at are the ones that have been around for a long time, write about what they have done and who they've done it with. And of course, if they've written books saying, yes, well, I was working with Tony Robbins, for example. Well, you're not going to be able to get away with saying that sort of thing in a book unless you can actually back it up. So things like that count. And I do know someone that specifically applies to. But also, are they local or are they just popping in from somewhere else to stand before you for five minutes? Yeah. If you want to open your eyes up, go and look at some of the YouTubers, like Coffeezilla. Coffeezilla digs into people and he's just exposed a big scam with a New Zealand journalist. Actually, I think it was a$300 million scam, but again, a Ponzi scheme. And it opens your eyes to what all these experts online are doing. A lot of the. For example, the crypto stuff, there's a lot of pump and dump goes on where they're telling you, oh, I'm, I'm holding. And then people are actually checking and they're seeing trades happening while they're saying that, and everybody else is buying, they're dumping. And that happens all the time. It's all about the money and it's all about the hustle. So you definitely need to be careful who you follow. I've found over the years, the experts that I follow are the ones that are the most casual, to be honest. They don't hype, they talk normally, they give examples. They've got the interview people and that person's talking to them and they hold a proper conversation. They have other people who talk about how they help them. Like there's a whole person there and you can see it. James Schramko is a good example of that. James has been around forever and he's a really great Internet marketer, but he's got the backing of a lot of people who say that he actually helped them. And you can find that you've just got to look a little further than looking at the confidence up front. LinkedIn, I think, is a really interesting thing to bring up in relation to this subject, because if I hear about anyone now or if I'm recommended to talk to someone or someone reaches out to me, the first thing I'll do is go and see what they look like on LinkedIn. I don't do it on Facebook, I don't look at them on all of the other things. But if I can see that. Or maybe I'll look at YouTube, but if I can see that they are really well set up on LinkedIn and that they have good reviews that they've not only received, but given they've done a good job of charting what their history is, then that's far more believable for me. Whereas you get, I mean the reason why I bring this up is that it's not hard to go and find someone's history if they are legitimately wanting to do business with you. They will legitimately in most industries have a decent LinkedIn profile and they will have other people have talked to about them. I just here, it's so easy to fake it, but it's actually relatively easy to see past the fakery when you know how to look for it. Yeah, and I will also run like AI searches on people. I'll actually ask the AI about people and see what it knows already about that person. But then you send it on deep research as well, give it a starting point and tell it to cross reference everything and it'll come back and tell you whether someone's fake or not. It's quite funny. That's interesting. I didn't know you could do that. You can actually ask it, is this person fake or is this a real person? Do what they say. Does what they say actually match what they can do based on what you can find? And you can find out some really interesting stuff that way. That is interesting. These days online, one of the key things we talk about influencers, but we've got visibility beats experience. You know, people who get more views make more money. And so you've got to understand, just because someone's getting a million views on their video doesn't mean they're an expert. It means they've worked out how to get views. Yeah, it's a vanity metric and you've got to be aware of that. Vanity metrics aren't real. They look good, they smell good, but they don't necessarily convert to sales and they don't necessarily show that the person has any real experience to help you. So again, before you work with someone or buy from them, go and look at their background. You'll see it. I mean, for example, myself, I'm not saying I'm the be all and end all, but you go back through my history, there's a long history of content online about me. I'm not new and it's all along the same sorts of lines, teaching people to market online. And so there's a long history there. Plus even some of the Recommendations on my LinkedIn are very old. Like me. You know, there's people with 20, 30 years of real world experience that come from a background before there was lots of online stuff. So therefore they've got the hands on sort of stuff. That said, there's plenty of young people who are experts in specific topics and can teach you stuff. I'm not saying that's not a thing, I'm saying that get them to demonstrate that they can do it. Look for the real results. It doesn't matter what field it is, whether it's making reels or whether it's building boats, it doesn't matter. Look for the real evidence before you hand over money because there's definitely a lot to be learned. I mean, my daughter obviously does social media marketing for companies and she taught me something the other day and I'm like oh really? And I'd never heard of it and yet she's like, oh yeah, everybody knows that. I didn't, but it was, it's a thing and it's true. And I happen to mention it to one of the young women at my fire brigade last night. She's like, oh yeah, that's what you do. And I'm like, okay. So they all know that and I don't. So there is stuff to be learned, there's no doubt about it. And if you are a young person and you are wanting to advance yourself into an area where this is critical, then you can do things like apprentice yourself to people who are already established and give their recommendations. Now I'm working with your daughter Penny, but I've known her since she was. I still had braces on tails, but I've known her for a number of years and I have been able to work with her and see her real value and I've recommended her to other people and she's recommended people to me. And there have been good times where we've connected professionally and I've been able to get the full measure of how good she is at what she does. It's not hard for a young person who's really intent on getting into an experts related industry to reach out for someone that they may know. And if they don't know someone, then start going to some of the meetings with professional speakers, for example, or Figuring out what they need to know and how they need to learn to be credible and to be credible enough to then get an opportunity to work with someone who will recommend them into that environment. Again, that's not hard to do. I'm lucky that I know Penny through you. But as you say, not all young people are incompetent. Some of them are incredible. And we have a duty perhaps to support the credible ones who are out there because they do work extra hard. When they get what they're doing, they really are good and worthy of it. It's in our best interests to support and nurture that expertise. Because they're the ones. Yeah. And are the ones that are fighting against this whole trend of the fakery probably harder than the rest of us because of their being relatively new into this kind of industry. Yeah, absolutely. And we've got all of that going on, but it's not new, this sort of thing. These fake experts, we've seen them for many. One of the areas, I'll be honest with you, that I've seen them many times is business coaches. I've always kind of been very skeptical of that field and now I know some really good business coaches. In fact, the one that taught me and helped me build my business was exceptional and still works with very high level companies. But then there's plenty that when you ask them about their background, they've never run a business. Yeah. And you're like, well, how can you advise me about my small business or my business? You've never actually sat up at night and worried about where your paycheck's going to come from because you've got 15 staff, you've been an accountant for Price WaterhouseCoopers or something. And so again, just because someone has expertise doesn't mean that they really know what they're talking about. They're just presenting themselves that way. Well, it's interesting you bring up coaches because like, I have an accountant who is a client of mine who I was his business coach and marketing coach way back in the early days before he became my accountant. And he has also said and written a couple of books on this. He's also said the frustration he has with the accounting industry is that so many accountants put a hat on their head and say, oh, well, I'm a coach or I'm a business advisor as well. But they've never run a business or they're a small business specialist or they're doing small business accounting. And they've only ever worked for Pricewaterhouse or Deloitte's or whatever, there's some serious fakery going on in that kind of industry. But also when I first trained as a coach, and my training was two and a half years, and I opted first as a business and then a marketing coach before I moved into publishing. And I've worked with a number of companies across a number of different industries as a business and marketing coach, which is great. But I for many years shied away from telling people I was a coach because I didn't want to be thrown into the same level of thinking by most people as, oh yeah, just another coach everywhere. I can put my hat on my head and say, I'm a coach too. And so the industry as a whole has suffered remarkably from that lack of confidence in the coaching industry, which is slowly starting to change with certifications and longevity. But I think that also comes into the publishing industry, the tech industry, the obviously the speaking industry. If there are no ring fencing and boundaries set up at an authority level to stop people from just getting in and saying they can do it, then we're going to continue to see this level of fakery. There's just no getting around it. Absolutely. Look, the lesson for today really is it's not about becoming fake. It's about learning how to position yourself. The answer's not being manipulative like some people are. It's the genuine experts need to learn to communicate, tell stories, get their positioning right and understand the audience psychology, which is what these people do. The gurus do understand that, and they use it against them. And to understand that expertise without visibility is invisible. You know you're not going to show up. You need to take from these people how they become visible. You need to learn how to do that, but then apply you to that. Well said. Absolutely well said. We'll solve the problem of it all today, but that was certainly well worth diving into. So if this episode has you thinking about writing a book and you're not sure how to shape your ideas, reach out to dixie@indiaexpertspublishing.com she can help you turn what's in your head into a clear, compelling book that builds real authority. And if you want to get more out of AI and automation, join my Authority Multiplier coaching community at BradHawk.com you'll learn how to use AI to grow your business and so save time. And of course, if you love what we're doing, please review us because we live and die by reviews. As always. Thanks, Brad. That's been a fantastic conversation. As always, I'll look forward to seeing you next week. Yep. See you next week.