The bottom of the laptop is getting uncomfortably hot on my legs. It’s a cheap, physical reminder of the digital garbage I’m consuming. On the screen, a kid who can’t be more than 22 is yelling. Not talking, but actually yelling, his voice cracking with a manufactured urgency that sets my teeth on edge. He’s in the driver’s seat of a Lamborghini that’s so orange it looks like a safety cone. The reflection in his sunglasses shows the unmistakable silhouette of a camera rig, not an open road.

He’s talking about a cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of, some coin with a dog-themed name and a promise of changing the world. “This is it, guys! The one we’ve been waiting for! A guaranteed 108x from here, minimum!” he screams, slapping the steering wheel for emphasis. Thousands of people are watching live. The comments scroll by in a frantic, unreadable blur of rocket emojis and desperate hope. Then comes the magic trick, the little sleight of hand that absolves him of everything. He leans into the camera, lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and says,

And just like that, the liability vanishes. A puff of smoke. He just sold a thousand lottery tickets and convinced the buyers that if they all lose, it’s their own fault for scratching them.

The Severed Link: Confidence as the New Credential

This isn’t just about crypto. It’s everywhere. The fitness influencer with impossible abs selling a diet plan that would put a rabbit in the hospital. The productivity guru with an 18-step morning routine that requires you to wake up last Tuesday. The self-proclaimed marketing expert whose only successful marketing campaign is the one where he sells you a course on marketing. We have created an entire ecosystem that has severed the ancient, vital link between expertise and responsibility. The loudest voice wins, not the most accurate one.

My friend Noah A. would have a field day with this. Noah investigates insurance fraud for a living. His job is to find the hairline cracks in stories that seem perfectly smooth on the surface. He doesn’t look for the big, obvious lie; he looks for the small, impossible detail. He once told me about a staged car accident claim. The two drivers had a great story, everything matched up, the police report was clean. But Noah noticed the coffee stain on the passenger seat of one car was perfectly circular.

That’s what he does. He finds the placid coffee cup in the middle of a car crash. And when he looks at the online guru landscape, he sees nothing but placid coffee cups.

“In my world, if you give advice that causes damage, you’re on the hook. An architect designs a faulty balcony, the balcony falls, he’s liable. A doctor messes up a surgery, she’s liable. But these guys? They’ve found a loophole in reality. They get to play architect, doctor, and financial planner, but they’ve built their houses on a foundation of ‘not financial advice.’ There’s no skin in the game. It’s a performance of expertise without the burden of consequence.”

The Illusion of Empire: Selling Maps to Unfound Treasures

I’ll admit, I almost fell for it once. It wasn’t a crypto guru, but a business coach. He was smooth, articulate, and his story was incredible. Built a multi-million dollar empire from nothing in just 18 months. He had 288 testimonials. I was stuck in a rut, and his promises felt like a ladder. I was halfway through the checkout page for his $988 ‘mastermind’ course when I decided to do what the guru himself ironically suggested: my own research. It took me less than 28 minutes to find the court documents from his bankruptcy two years prior. The ’empire’ was a carefully curated illusion. The money he was making now wasn’t from his supposed business; it was from selling courses about the business he never actually succeeded at.

He was selling the map to a treasure he never found.

The Vaporized Barrier: Signal vs. Noise

We used to have gatekeepers. Editors, publishers, academic institutions, regulatory bodies. They were imperfect, often slow and biased, but they served a function: they created a barrier to entry that demanded at least some level of proof. You couldn’t just declare yourself an expert. You had to convince someone who had a reputation to lose.

Now, the only barrier to entry is the ability to edit a video or write a viral thread. The crowd is the only editor, and the crowd is notoriously bad at fact-checking. It’s great at amplifying emotion, though. And what’s a more potent emotion than the hope of a quick, life-changing fix?

This creates a weird paradox. The sheer volume of information available is staggering, but finding reliable signals in the noise is harder than ever. People get overwhelmed and default to the most confident-sounding source. The real work, the actual utility, is often quiet. It isn’t screamed from a rented Lamborghini. It’s a tool that does a specific job reliably. It’s boring, and in this attention economy, boring doesn’t sell. Think about the crypto space again. For all the noise about 108x returns and moonshots, one of the most persistent, real-world problems is simply using digital assets for daily life. The conversation is always about getting rich, not about being able to live. But the practical ability to Buy visa card with bitcoin represents a far more tangible step forward than a thousand meme coins. It’s a bridge, not a lottery ticket. It’s utility. It’s quiet, and it works.

Liability Asymmetry: The Cost of ‘Free’ Advice

Noah talks about this as “liability asymmetry.” He sees it in his cases all the time. A clinic submits a fraudulent claim for $48,888. If they get caught, they pay a fine. If they don’t, it’s pure profit. The risk/reward is skewed in their favor. The online guru operates on the ultimate asymmetry. They risk nothing. A bad call costs them a bit of social media clout, which they can rebuild with the next prediction. But the person who takes their advice? They could lose their savings, their house, their future. The listener is bearing 100% of the risk for advice they got for ‘free’.

I find myself questioning my own role in this. I’m writing this, sharing an opinion, essentially giving a form of advice by pointing out a problem. I don’t have a professional license in financial regulation. I’m just a guy with a hot laptop and an observation. The difference, I hope, is the intent. I’m not selling a secret or a shortcut. I’m just holding up a mirror. The kid in the Lamborghini isn’t the sickness; he’s a symptom of our collective desire for impossible certainty. We want the answer, and we want it to be easy. He’s just smart enough, or cynical enough, to sell it to us.

The Vacuum of Accountability

Noah’s final thought on it was the most chilling. He was reviewing a file from a woman who lost her entire retirement fund, over $238,000, on a single options trade recommended by an anonymous Twitter account with an anime avatar. The account had 88,000 followers. After the trade went spectacularly wrong, the account was simply deleted. Gone.

He just picked up the next file. The work never ends.