So much for experts...

Join me on a minute-long journey back to March 2000. We had survived Y2K and had not yet heard of Al Qaeda. The stock market was booming and CNBC seemed to be on TV anywhere we went.

Then the dot com bubble burst and the market plunged. Hundreds of internet startups whose valuations had defied the laws of financial gravity lost most of their value. They dragged the rest of the market down with them.

The gym in my NYC coop building was one of the places in which CNBC was on TV by default. That’s where I watched market expert Jim Cramer, immediately post-plunge, issue a cursory non-apology for recommending that viewers continue to invest in tech stocks up until that crash. In short, his message was “Oops, sorry.”

As an investor who had followed the crowd into the dot com bubble, this was a costly but valuable lesson about following the advice of “experts.” If this financial guru could be so wrong – and so unrepentant about his bad advice – why would I ever be willing to trust the next fast-talking, telegenic, so-called expert?

ICYMI: Speaking of experts that you CAN trust (see what I did there?), check out my recent appearance on the No More Bad Events podcast, hosted by Scott Bloom. It’s a lively discussion about how to make your next event or presentation as energizing and effective as possible.