How to spot a fake expert.

[Music] [Music] hi we're out on the range today so please bear with gunfire you might hear in the background and fair warning all I'm going to do today is talk and you're gonna have to put up with my shatner asked pauses and my speech impediment and everything else and what we're talking about today is the warning signs that you're talking to somebody who is a fake expert now a few days ago someone commented on one of my presentations and he went on about all the problems I was creating being an amateur that was giving people advice and then he said that all real professionals carry their pistol on their right hip they do all of them well let me think I've carried a pistol professionally and not always on the right hip I've seen a lot of police officers that use shoulder holster or ankle holster or what have you and then there's that pesky thing that you know some people are left-handed and carry it on their left hip so he makes this just blanket outlandish statement that is completely false and that got me thinking well what are the warning signs of someone who's pretending to be an expert and I came up with my top five list of red flags that should tell you that you're dealing with somebody who is either lying to you trying to convince you they're an expert when they're not or lying to themselves trying to convince themselves they're an expert when they're not so in no particular order the top five are first someone who speaks absolutely authoritative ly on something that not only does he not know but he's not in a position that he even would know he's never seen it done never tried to do it himself hasn't seen a YouTube video on it hasn't done the research he's just not in a position that he'd know one way or the other but seems to be convinced that he does example I'm talking to a couple of people one of which is a very bright inquisitive guy but he knows virtually nothing about guns and he says to me hey Paul what would happen if you loaded let's say a 270 cartridge with black powder now that's an interesting question but before I could even answer him somebody pops off and says well the bullet wouldn't even develop it under the merit so I then have to go through the dissertation of explaining you know all those cartridges in the 1870s and 1880s like 45 colt forty four forty forty five seventy the list goes on you know all of those were loaded with black powder oh so thin he has to admit that he didn't know you think well if you didn't know what made you so convinced that you did now second on my list is the guy who can and all too often does quote the ballistics chart chapter and verse he has memorized all the velocities the energy footpath how much it's gonna drop at a given distance and he will quote this like it is gospel again case in point I'm talking to a group of people then the subject comes up of forty five seventy and I said well generally speaking there's a lot of different forty five seventy loads but what would be considered most typical as a four hundred and five grain bullet going about 1,300 feet per second somebody corrects me and says it's not 1300 it's actually 1330 the textbook answer from the Remington ballistics chart but he doesn't take into consideration you know I didn't mention a brand name different companies have different velocities for their ammunition and he seems to know so little about the subject that he hasn't taken into consideration that you know the variation from one cartridge to the next is quite often more than 30 feet per second and he didn't think about things like all that stuff that can affect your velocity ambient temperature barometric pressure elevation and a big one barrel length you know with my 45 70 carbine thirteen hundred and thirty I typically with this Remington ammunition get velocities of 1100 and change because it has a short barrel and not only all of that he hasn't taken into consideration that the guns that are used to create the numbers in that charge are not necessarily the same guns with the same barrel lengths that everybody has for example if you take a caliber like 3030 the two by far most common guns that shoot that caliber are the Winchester 1894 and the Marlin 336 series and they come in different barrel lengths but what is again by far the most common is a 20 inch barrel on both of them if you look at the fine print of the ballistics chart it says that the numbers they got were arrived at by using the gun with a 24 inch bar so even if the numbers in the chart are correct they are not representative of the results that the great majority of us are going to get in the field and this person is so desperate to be considered an expert and look like he knows what he's talking about but just by virtue that he says that demonstrates that he doesn't know very much about real shooting at all now don't get me wrong the ballistics chart is a good tool it is good information it's something you should read but it was not written by the Apostles now the third guy on my list is kind of the opposite of that he's the justice powerful guy that he for whatever reason has some kind of off-brand or obscure gun or cartridge and he's kind of defensive about it so he has to become the advocate for it and he'll go around talking about how whatever he has is just as powerful as whatever mainstream thing people have case in point for a while the foreign military rifle that you can get dirt-cheap has been the SKS not so much anymore but it was for a long time well in a generation prior to that the foreign military rifle that everybody got dirt-cheap was british military surplus those 303 British bolt-action rifles I had one you could get him for virtually nothing at the time well I knew a guy that had one and I think he was a little defensive about it so he had to say that it was just as powerful as a 30.6 well if you look at the two cartridges the 303 is pretty close to the 36 in size and it is if you use the same bullet weight in both pretty close in power the 303 is a potent round but if you look at the ballistics chart no it doesn't quite measure up to a 30-yard 6 it's close but not quite there and I had the very experience of watching this guy say how it was just as powerful so somebody else different guy somebody else brought in the ballistics chart and shows him no it's not as powerful and they go back and forth with this neither of them taking into consideration things like what kind of rifle are you talking about does it have the typical 303 rifle or does he have that jungle carbine with a much shorter barrel and compared to a 30.6 of what make and model with what barrel length and it became kind of a painful process to watch and you see that kind of thing in life just as powerful guy sometimes when people are in a certain financial position or whatever they can't run out and buy the latest greatest thing and they end up with some fairly cheap guns and they can get defensive about them and I would tell you no don't do that if you're in a position where you're relegated to having not the latest newest coolest thing then that's perfectly OK for example look at this beretta model 1951 no it isn't it's the Egyptian hell when knockoff of a beretta 1951 and I'm sure he'll win is a mispronunciation I buy it it comes with two magazines it's a rugged well-built pistol it's accurate its dependable if this is the kind of gun you have then parade the thing learn how to shoot it competently and don't let anybody tell you it's inadequate guns like that'll get you through about 95% of the time and so you don't need to become the champion for whatever obscure thing you have just be glad that you have it and I'm gonna go off on a tangent here with the Justice powerful guy I've been reluctant to tell this but this seems like the right format to do it the story of how a 22 long rifle is just as powerful as a 30.6 if I put together all the nonsense I've heard over the years I can make a case for this there was the guy who said that a 22 magnum is not enough more powerful than a 22 long rifle to matter that they're just the difference is negligible but then there's another guy that says that a 22 magnum is more powerful than a 38 special then there's plenty of people that will tell you in a snubnose revolver a 38 special + p is just as powerful as a 357 magnum then there was the salesman I heard trying to tell a customer that at a hundred yards a 357 Magnum has more energy than a 3030 then of course we know that a 3030 is more powerful than a 760 by 39 hit the ak-47 rod generally speaking again depending on barrel lengths the type of gun you're using what kind of ammo you buy they'll have very similar velocities but the 3030 will usually get that velocity with 150 grain bullet while the 760 by 39 is quite off 120 300 point for grain so the 3030 is marginally more powerful than 760 about 39 then there was an expert on television he was on the news trying to explain this I know he was an expert because he said he was that he showed an SKS and he said this is an SKS rifle it's caliber 7.62 by 39 which is roughly as powerful as a 30 watt 6 really Wow I guess I've wasted my life so put all that together and you've got 22 long-rifle is just as powerful as a 30.6 but to get back on task the next guy on my list is the guy who talks in great detail about all the guns that he doesn't really have now there's two different factions in this one is the guy who tells you he has a bunch of guns then when you get to really talking to him he they're not really guns now this was a long time ago I can't remember the details of it but basically I'm talking to a guy who says he has about 10 guns oh really what kind of guns you have well three of them were BB guns I think three of them were paintball guns then one of them was some partial gun it was something like he has a set of barrels for a double barreled shotgun but doesn't have the rest of the gun but he counts that as a gun and so this conversation starts with he has 10 guns ones with he's got a 22 rifle and 22 pistol that's it then there's the other guy who talks about all the guns he doesn't tell because he just doesn't have them for example talking to a guy I work with he mentions owning quite a few handguns and he mentions owning a particular one I don't remember what it was now but he's talking about this particular model which was a rare one that I had never seen in personally I say hey can you bring that into the office I'd love to see it well no he can't because the guns at his dad's house okay can you drop by your dad's house and pick it up cuz I'd really like to see it no he can't because his dad lives in Minnesota which was about two thousand miles away from where we were at the time then you get to talking to him and all these handguns he's talking about he's not actually in possession of any of them which makes it highly doubtful that he ever did have any of them no I said that these were not in any particular order and they're not so we've got the speaks authoritative Lee guy the ballistics chart guy the justice powerful guy and the talks about guns he doesn't have guy but I have saved the number one for last this is by far the number one way to tell that you're talking to somebody that does not know very much about guns at all and that's when somebody says any one of the various different versions of saying there's no such thing as and there's different ways you can say it like when someone says I have a Smith & Wesson model 37 no Smith & Wesson didn't make a model 37 well that's wording it differently but he's still telling you no such thing as which by the way yes they did make it 37 another way of saying it is when someone says something about it 10 millimeter and you say no you mean a 9 millimeter that's another version of no such thing as and I got to tell you that one bit me way back a long time ago in the 10 millimeter first came out or at least when people were first becoming aware of it a co-worker in mine tells me that the gun Don Johnson used on that show Miami Vice was a 10 millimeter I said you mean a 9 monie and I remember that that was the one time I act that was a stupid thing for me to say any it was Steve a certain no 10 millimeter well yes 10 millimeter does exist I just never heard of it and so when someone tells you there's no such yeah that's an indicator they don't know near as much as they think they do and I didn't know near as much as I thought I did know I could call you for an hour with anecdotes just on this one particular topic but I'm gonna narrow it down to just a few one of my favourites is long time ago I was doing an activity with a group of people who we all drove and met in a certain space and several of us had cars that we thought were cool probably but we thought they were cool and the car I had at the time was a 1966 Cadillac Sedan Deville and no no not the time the lunatic tried to tell me it was a Coupe de Ville and there's no such thing as a sedan de Ville even though it clearly sedan the bill and the body tag on the car no not that time different guy a couple of guys are checking out my car and want to masks what engine it has he found it to 4:29 instantly somebody tells me hate to tell you this Paul but Chevy never made a 429 so I have to tell him hate to tell you this Mike but it's not a Chevy now Chevrolet and Cadillac are both made by GM and there can be some similarities but especially in the 1960s it's a complete misnomer to think that they're the exact same car and this guy was desperate to be seen as an expert but the reality is he knew so little about the subject that he didn't even know how much he didn't know another one of my favorite anecdotes is I'm talking to a guy and I'm telling him that I really think number four buckshot is a good load for a shotgun and about the second time I say number four buckshot he gets incensed and he he kind of goes off you keep talking about number four buckshot there's only three sizes of buckshot single double triple lot okay so I go over to you know the ammo I pull out a box of shot shells similar to this and I show him number four buck then I pull out a box of shot shells like this one number three buck and then I have to explain to him that buckshot comes in a fairly wide variety of sizes it's just there's only a few types that you khaleesi loaded in shotshells at the store and so he had to kind of oh well okay you know at the time that didn't occur to me to ask him so did you think I was lying or did you think I can't read English now one more anecdote and this is my favorite one talking to a guy one day and the subject comes up about a winchester model 1894 which is kind of the ubiquitous lever action rifle and I tell him that I have a Marlin model 1894 and he said no model 94 is a Winchester no this is a Marlin and he repeats himself no model 94 in Chester okay well let's take a look at this rifle right here the Marlin firearms company North Haven Connecticut model 1894 s so there you go Jason and that would be by far the number one red flag that you're talking to somebody who's trying to convince you they're an expert just aren't is when they use some version of there's no such thing as so there's my top five if you have a different top five I'd love to hear about it and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Paul Harrell

Views: 1,666,454

Rating: 4.8623714 out of 5

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Id: N1Sw8fe9hJI

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/AppleDane]

Knowing nothing about guns I can tell this guy is an expert: He's talking with confidence in an American accent.

[u/MenuBar]

Anybody who claims that the Star Wars Christmas Special doesn't count as a Star Wars movie is not really an expert on the subject.

[u/Aerothermal]

I was quite impressed with how self-aware this guy is. He touches on a few cognitive biases, and then his anecdotes encountering them when discussing firearms with people. Perhaps others here might find this interesting.

[u/briangilroy]

This is good advice about just helping people to call bs. Sure this is just about guns, but a lot of these points are pretty good for other things to. Of course, if you try to call these faux experts out on their bullshit they will likely get defensive, and start attacking you personally. I find it easier to nod and smile, and just remember he's full of shit and not take anything they say seriously.