We’ve all seen the reels.
A young, fit, articulate person confidently declaring:
“The ONE thing your swimmer’s technique is missing!”
“The top three exercises to prevent injury!”
The comments are glowing. They have 50,000 followers.
Everything about it signals expertise.
But today, signal is cheap.
So how do you separate expert from charlatan? Fact from fiction?
An Age-Old Story with Brighter Lights
The word charlatan comes from the Italian ciarlatano, literally “the babbler,” a first cousin to the mountebank who arrived by wagon in the town square selling tonics, wares, and miracle cures.
They understood your pain points centuries ago.
Today it sounds more like this:
Fix your starts. Fix your turns. Unlock your underwater dolphin kick. Here’s why you can’t sprint. This is what every Olympian does. Do this if you want to swim Division I.
They had to be sensational because an outsider selling to wary townsfolk couldn’t afford to be ordinary. Everything was a silver bullet, and it had to work fast because they’d be gone before it didn’t.
The tonic usually contained a little truth, often mixed with booze or narcotics.
Every new medium follows the same cycle. Mail-order swindles became so widespread that Congress created the federal mail fraud statute in 1872. Radio gave us the infamous goat-gland doctor, who built one of the largest audiences in America while selling surgical quackery.
Today, anyone with a phone can stand in the town square.
The new proxies of expertise, followers, production value, and polish, measure reach and persuasion rather than competence.
Social media has its quacks.
But no laws.
We’re living in the gap.
Society’s answer has traditionally been to build gatekeepers and safeguards: regulators, licensing bodies, audits, and educational institutions. Over time, those systems developed problems of their own, but that’s a discussion for another article.
Meanwhile, young coaches and experienced veterans trying to stay current scroll through the same feeds parents do, looking for anything that might help their athletes.
The noise doesn’t discriminate by audience.
What Is Expertise?
Contributory expertise is the ability to actually do a thing.
Interactional expertise is fluency in the language of a field, the ability to sound like someone who can do the thing.
Social media is an interactional expertise machine.
It ruthlessly selects for people who sound like experts. Sixty-second clips are perfect for that.
The mistake we keep making is assuming that captivation, credentials, and expertise are the same thing.
They aren’t.
The Anatomy of the Modern Charlatan
Puberty is the charlatan’s silent business partner.
“I used their program and dropped four seconds.”
Maybe.
Or maybe you also grew four inches.
The only way to separate a program from a growth curve is time. You have to follow the same athletes across years, through growth spurts, plateaus, setbacks, and the entire journey from age eight to eighteen.
Second, borrowed outcomes.
Listen carefully to how credibility gets claimed in this sport.
“I worked with an Olympic champion.”
Doing what?
Standing near success is not the same as producing it.
Programs succeed because head coaches and their staffs carry the daily burden of every decision, every season, and every athlete. Around every successful program is a wide orbit of people who were present for the outcome without ever being responsible for it.
Some now market that proximity as a résumé.
This is the touch of truth that makes the pitch work. Like the old tonic, the claim isn’t necessarily false. It’s simply doing far more work than it earned.
Third, they’re gone like a thief in the night.
The online guru is rarely your athlete’s day-to-day coach. They aren’t there on Tuesday morning when the shoulder starts hurting. When the program fails, they disappear, or better yet, the failure lands on someone else’s shoulders.
The old snake oil salesman at least had to leave town by wagon.
His modern counterpart never has to arrive at all.
The distance isn’t a limitation of the business.
It is the business.
Put those together and you have the complete racket.
They capture credit for a child’s natural development or another coach’s work while exporting every failure to the coach who’s actually on deck.
Heads they win.
Tails the coach loses.
Skin in the Game
When deciding whom to trust with your athlete, bet on accountability.
The least impressive self-promoter is often the athlete’s primary coach.
Charlatans sometimes offer genuinely useful information.
What they can never acquire is skin in the game because their entire business model depends on its absence.
One important caveat: there are accountable coaches who never do the work of getting better. That’s simply mediocrity with witnesses.
But accountability tends to correct mistakes over time.
Creating Your Filter
A disclosure.
We use social media to promote what we do, which means we’re asking you to distrust a medium that benefits us.
So don’t take our word for anything.
Put us through the filter first.
Before you follow anyone’s program, protocol, or advice for your swimmer, ask yourself:
- Who is standing there when it doesn’t work, not when it does?
- Can they show the same athletes improving over years, or only highlight reels and other people’s champions?
- Do they sell certainty or process? Real experts often say, “It depends.” Silver bullets are a snake oil tell.
- What happens to them if they’re wrong? Usually nothing. You bear the cost, and your athlete bears the cost.
Why It Matters
The stakes aren’t the $99.
Follow bad guidance long enough and it costs developing athletes healthy bodies, reinforces technical habits that take years to undo, burns kids out of a sport they once loved, and spends the one resource nobody can refund.
A parent can recover money.
A swimmer can’t get age twelve back.
We’re already hearing it on deck.
Coaches repeat claims from the latest social media sensation because they’ve heard them enough times that they feel true.
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. Repetition alone increases perceived truth, and repetition is exactly what the algorithm manufactures at infinite scale.
The instinct to assume the person you see most must know the most isn’t a moral failing.
It’s a documented human tendency.
There’s reason for optimism.
What ended many earlier waves of charlatanism wasn’t regulation alone.
It was exposure.
Journalists and genuine experts were willing to say publicly, “This isn’t true,” and the public learned to ask better questions.
Sunlight came first.
Then the law.
We’re not interested in policing the free market of ideas.
But when we see lies and half-truths being sold to swim families, we’ll call them what they are.
The Road Ahead
Generative AI is the next wagon rolling into town.
This time, the fake expert can arrive with fake videos, fake results, and a face that never existed, speaking words that were never spoken.
Every previous charlatan at least had to be real.
The filter you build now isn’t just a social media survival skill.
It’s a life skill.
Knowledge has never been cheaper.
Judgment has never been more valuable.
Ask the same question townsfolk eventually learned to ask centuries ago:
Where will you be when this doesn’t work?
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