The Internet is Loud. Expertise is Quiet

The modern internet often feels disorienting to me. Everyone seems to speak more than they listen, and read, to the extent they read at all, more than they study. The people who have spent years understanding something are often the hardest ones to hear.

This becomes especially frustrating when you’re facing a decision that matters. You can find endless advice on building a company, raising children, changing careers, or becoming a better leader. But whose advice should you take? Who actually understands what you’re facing?

The first person I wanted to turn to was my grandfather.

Before the Iranian Revolution, he had been one of the country’s most successful businessmen, known for both what he built and his integrity. He escaped, lost almost everything, and rebuilt his life.

Years later, as a founder, I found myself wanting to ask him questions. The kind that only arrive once you’re responsible for something real. What would you do in my situation? How do you choose when both options feel wrong?

A stroke took those conversations from us.

He had written a memoir, which I read carefully. I could learn what he had done, but I couldn’t ask how he would think through what I was facing.

So I built a digital version of him. Software couldn’t replace my grandfather, but I wanted something closer to the experience of asking someone I trusted how they think. That experiment eventually became Delphi.

The question behind it has only become more important to me: how do we find the right people to learn from, and make their experience useful in our own lives?

Where we are now

We live in an era that somehow manages to be both information-rich and knowledge-poor. We have immediate access to more information than we could ever consume, yet it can still be difficult to figure out who actually understands what they’re talking about.

Someone who has spent twenty years building businesses can share a careful account of what went wrong, while a person who has never managed a team goes viral explaining the five rules of leadership. A researcher qualifies a finding because they understand its limitations. Someone else removes the qualifications and turns it into a life hack.

The strange result is that expertise hasn’t vanished. It has simply been buried beneath a mountain of performative certainty.

Everyone sounds authoritative now.

For much of modern history, expertise was scarce and gatekept. You needed credentials, institutional backing, someone with a printing press, a newsroom, or a university willing to stand behind what you said. That system had its flaws. It excluded plenty of people whose experience deserved to be heard. But it also gave us a clearer sense of where to look.

Today the gates are gone, which is great in many ways. But the demolition crew also took the road signs with them.

The tools that democratized information made it harder to distinguish knowledge from performance. We discover people through follower counts, polished profiles, and the ability to hold our attention. Those signals tell us who is good at being heard. They tell us much less about who is worth listening to.

And so we arrive at our current paradox: expertise is everywhere, and increasingly harder to identify.

Why the person matters

AI makes this question more important.

I use it every day. It helps me build, explore ideas, and understand things faster. But as generating information becomes easier, the person behind a perspective becomes more valuable to me.

When someone gives advice, I want to understand where it came from.

What have they done? What have they studied? What did they believe before experience changed their mind? Have they lived with the consequences of the decision I’m about to make?

These questions give me a way to assess their judgment.

A founder who has rebuilt a company after nearly losing it has a relationship with risk that I want to understand. A teacher who has worked with hundreds of struggling students may recognize something that a list of study tips misses. Someone who has cared for an aging parent can speak to responsibilities they have actually carried.

Their experience doesn’t make them right about everything. It gives me context for deciding where their perspective might help.

This is also why opinions matter. Knowing whose opinion I’m hearing lets me examine the experiences, assumptions, and values behind it. I can disagree with their conclusion and still learn from how they reached it.

Two thoughtful people can look at the same situation and recommend different paths. Understanding why can teach us more than either answer alone.

As information becomes commoditized, credibility and perspective become more important. We need to know whose judgment we’re borrowing, and where its limits are.

Learning requires listening

Access alone won’t solve this.

We’ve become very good at collecting advice. We save posts, subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, and move on to the next thing. I do this too. It’s easy to mistake the amount we’ve consumed for the amount we’ve understood.

Listening asks more of us.

It means staying with someone’s thinking long enough to understand it. Asking why they believe something. Being willing to hear an answer that challenges the story we’ve been telling ourselves.

The people who help us grow aren’t always the ones who make us feel right. Sometimes they notice the assumption we haven’t questioned, or the pattern we don’t want to admit.

What would it look like to build systems that encourage that kind of listening? Can technology cultivate habits of curiosity and humility before the internet quietly conditions them out of us?

I think that is one of the most important opportunities in front of us.

Making experience personal

Even when we find someone credible, we still have to understand how their experience applies to ours.

A founder’s advice depends on the company they built, the market they entered, and the resources they had. A parent’s experience is shaped by their child and their circumstances. A career decision that worked for someone else may involve tradeoffs we aren’t willing or able to make.

This is why conversation matters.

You can explain where you are. Ask what’s different. Push back on an assumption. Say, “I understand why that worked for you, but here’s what I’m dealing with. How would that change your thinking?”

A book preserves what someone learned. A conversation helps you work through what it means for you.

Personalization should give us that opportunity. It should help us understand someone else’s perspective through the circumstances of our own lives, while leaving room for that perspective to challenge us.

The goal is to become better at thinking through our decisions.

What this could look like

Imagine you’re facing a difficult decision at work. Your business is growing, but everything still depends on you. You know something needs to change, and you don’t know what to hand off first.

Today, you might search, scroll, listen to a few podcasts, and encounter three contradictory recommendations delivered with identical confidence. After an hour, you have more advice and no clearer sense of what to do.

Now imagine starting with your situation.

You find an owner who worked through the same transition. You can see what they built, what they struggled with, and why their experience is relevant. You explore how they approached it, then ask follow-up questions that account for the differences between their business and yours.

The experience shifts from passive consumption to active understanding. You have a clearer sense of whose thinking you’re learning from, and a way to examine it.

That’s what we’re building with Delphi Perspectives.

You describe what you’re figuring out. Delphi helps you find people with relevant experience, explore perspectives grounded in their own work, and ask follow-up questions through their Delphis, interactive digital versions of their minds.

The expertise already exists. What’s missing is a way to find it when it matters, and engage with it in a way that helps.

An invitation

The larger ambition is to make the experience of one life available to help another.

There are people who have spent decades studying subjects we’re just beginning to understand. People who have made the decision we’re struggling with. People whose mistakes, discoveries, and hindsight could change how we see our next step.

Many of them will never have a large audience. Their experience still deserves to be found.

And each of us has figured out something that someone else is facing for the first time. Creating your own Delphi gives others a way to discover and learn from what you’ve lived through.

AI can help us make more of that human experience available. It can help us find people we would never have known to search for, and give us new ways to listen.

No one should have to walk alone through a decision someone else has already survived.

The age of noise isn’t inevitable. But it will win unless we build something better.