Ep. 3: So… Everyone’s an Expert Now?
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Dentists, cardiologists, influencers, productivity gurus — everyone has rules for how you’re supposed to live. But what happens when the advice becomes impossible to follow? In this episode, Matti unpacks why experts see the world differently, why social media creates instant “authorities,” and why your gut might be the most underrated filter of all.
TRANSCRIPT
Everyone’s an expert.
Your doctor. Your podcast host (hey, that’s me). Your friend from high school on Instagram. And at least six people on TikTok who swear they’ve cracked the code to life.
Somewhere along the way, we went from occasionally receiving advice to being completely buried under it. Every day we’re told what to eat, how to sleep, what supplements to take, how to invest, how to exercise, how to prevent disease, how to optimize our relationships, and how to become the best possible version of ourselves.
The information never stops.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about experts—both the real ones and the self-appointed ones—and how overwhelming it can be to navigate all of their recommendations. More importantly, I’ve been thinking about how we can filter through all that noise without spending our entire lives trying to optimize ourselves.
The Problem With Real Experts
Let’s start with actual experts because, to be clear, we need them.
Doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, real estate agents—these people serve important roles in our lives and often have valuable knowledge to share. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong. The problem is that sometimes the standards they present become impossible.
Many experts communicate as though there is a universally correct way to do something. They’ll share the five things everyone should do, the habits everyone should build, or the mistakes everyone should avoid. The challenge is that these recommendations are often designed for a hypothetical person, not for the complicated reality of your actual life.
The expert doesn’t know your schedule, your priorities, your limitations, or the twenty-seven other things competing for your attention on any given day.
Healthcare provides some of the clearest examples.
Take dentists. A few years ago, one of my neighbors was a dental student who had built a following online. Many of his videos focused on oral health and the things people should be doing to protect their teeth and gums. Sometimes the message wasn’t simply educational—it was delivered with a sense of disbelief that people weren’t already doing these things.
And even when the advice was perfectly reasonable, the list seemed endless: flossing routines, brushing techniques, mouthwash recommendations, water flossers, night guards, and on and on.
Then there are dermatologists.
Sometimes it feels like every skincare conversation begins with a fourteen-step morning routine and ends with a ten-step evening routine. Add sunscreen, serums, treatments, preventative care, and whatever the latest product happens to be, and suddenly maintaining your skin sounds like a full-time job.
Cardiologists have their own version of this. To them, sodium, cholesterol, and saturated fat can feel like the greatest threats facing humanity.
Even firefighters get pulled into this mindset.
I love firefighters. They’re attractive and should absolutely continue existing.
But if you’ve ever heard one discuss home safety, you know the feeling. You leave the conversation wondering whether sleeping with your bedroom door open is a catastrophic mistake or whether lighting a candle means you’ve accepted a reckless lifestyle.
Of course, risk exists everywhere. Walking across the street carries risk. The question isn’t whether risk exists; it’s how much risk is reasonable for each individual person.
One of my favorite examples of this dynamic comes from Friends. There’s an episode where Phoebe is dating both a kindergarten teacher and a firefighter. Eventually she chooses the firefighter, only for him to discover that one of her dates with the teacher involved a candlelit dinner in the park.
At first you think he’s jealous.
Instead, he says he can’t believe he’d date someone who would light a fire in a wooded area.
Then he breaks up with her.
She starts with two romantic prospects and somehow ends up with zero. It’s a perfect illustration of what happens when someone’s professional lens becomes their entire worldview.
Why Experts Think This Way
As I thought about all of this, I became curious about whether there was an explanation for it. It turns out there is.
One concept is called professional deformation. It describes what happens when someone works in a field for so long that they begin to see the world primarily through that lens. A dentist thinks about oral health constantly because oral health is their world. A cardiologist sees heart disease every day, so cardiovascular risk naturally feels more urgent to them than it does to everyone else.
A related concept is the availability heuristic. People tend to judge the importance of something based on how frequently they encounter it.
We all experience this. If you watch enough news about wars, disasters, or plane crashes, it can start to feel like those events are happening everywhere all the time. The same thing happens to specialists. A cardiologist sees heart attacks every day, so heart attacks occupy a larger place in their mental landscape than they do in yours.
There’s also Maslow’s Hammer, which says that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
A nutritionist is likely to view problems through the lens of food. A sleep specialist is likely to focus on sleep. Both may be looking at the exact same issue and offering completely different solutions because they’re relying on the tools they know best.
Finally, there’s expert bias, which happens when experts forget what it’s like not to know what they know.
Something that feels obvious to them may feel overwhelming to everyone else. When you’ve spent years immersed in a subject, best practices can seem simple. For the rest of us, they’re just one more item on an already crowded to-do list.
The Rise of the Self-Appointed Expert
Then there’s a second category of expert.
Unlike the people we’ve been discussing, these individuals aren’t necessarily experts at all. They’re simply people who had an experience and decided that experience qualifies them to give advice to everyone else.
Social media has made this phenomenon impossible to avoid.
Someone loses forty pounds through intermittent fasting and immediately becomes an authority on weight loss. Another person cuts carbohydrates and concludes they’ve discovered the secret to human health. Someone else improves their sleep and suddenly has a framework for solving everyone’s problems.
The pattern is always the same:
“This worked for me, therefore it should work for you.”
The issue is that personal experience is not universal truth.
A perfect example came from a creator I follow who has type 1 diabetes. He posted a photo of himself looking incredibly fit and healthy with a caption that said, “Anything is possible with type 1 diabetes.”
At first glance, the message seems inspiring.
But when you step back, you realize that people with type 1 diabetes are not all the same. They have different bodies, different circumstances, different resources, different ages, and different challenges.
Maybe what worked for him works for some people. Maybe it works for many people.
But “worked for me” is very different from “works for everyone.”
That’s where so much frustration comes from. We see someone else’s success, assume we’re supposed to be able to replicate it, and then wonder what’s wrong with us when we can’t.
Usually nothing is wrong with us.
We’re just different.
Finding a Filter
So where does that leave us?
We have real experts giving us more information than we can reasonably absorb. We have self-appointed experts giving us more information than we can reasonably absorb. And we have algorithms serving all of it to us twenty-four hours a day.
At some point, we need a filter.
The filter I’ve found most useful is surprisingly simple:
How does this feel?
When someone presents a nine-step oral hygiene routine, does it feel energizing or overwhelming?
When someone recommends a complicated wellness protocol, does it feel aligned with your life or does it make you want to crawl back into bed?
Those reactions matter.
They’re information.
If something consistently creates stress, resistance, or exhaustion, maybe that’s worth paying attention to. If something feels exciting, manageable, and sustainable, maybe that’s worth paying attention to too.
The challenge is resisting the urge to endlessly analyze why certain things don’t work for us.
I’m very good at falling into that trap.
If something feels difficult, I immediately want to investigate it, dissect it, and understand it. But sometimes the healthiest response is simply:
“I don’t know why this doesn’t work for me. It just doesn’t.”
And that’s okay.
Not every recommendation deserves a spot in your life.
People First
One of my favorite experts is financial advisor Suze Orman.
At the end of her television show and on her podcast, she often repeats the same phrase:
People first. Then money. Then things.
What I love is that when she says “people first,” she isn’t talking about your neighbors, your coworkers, or even your family.
She’s talking about you.
You come first.
I think the same principle applies here.
Experts can provide information. They can offer ideas. They can introduce possibilities you may never have considered.
But ultimately, you’re the one living your life.
You get to decide what fits.
You get to decide what matters.
You get to decide which advice is worth following and which advice is simply noise.
Because at the end of the day, you weren’t born to optimize your dental floss routine.
You were born to live.
The point isn’t perfection.
The point is participation.
And that’s how you know it’s gonna be fine.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
