Whom to Trust Online: How to Choose Content

In this episode, I look at how to choose quality content — online learning, courses, news and advice — so as not to get lost in other people’s opinions and not to deceive yourself. And at the question you need to start with when choosing any information.

What exactly do we want to get from an author: knowledge, confirmation of our own position, something to argue about, a sense of importance, or an understanding of what is happening? How can content help a person understand themselves — or, on the contrary, intensify fear, anxiety, hatred and ego? Why does an attractive picture of a country, a business or a lifestyle not reflect the whole of reality? And what responsibility does an author bear for the consequences of their words?

How to understand what content you need

You are asking exactly that: how to find quality content. There is now an enormous amount of content, including educational content and videos. How do you recognize quality content, how do you choose it, how do you approach it?

When we approach getting any information — whether it is a video, a course you have signed up for, or a person you are listening to — the most important question stands before you at the very beginning. It is the question that lets you look at the whole truth of what is happening and discover it for yourself.

Most of the time, for example, if you are scrolling through your Reels feed, you will see that you opened it mechanically, psychophysically, on a kind of autopilot, and that you actually don’t want to get anything at all. You do it automatically, as with an addiction, or, for example, out of boredom. Then a person tells themselves: I have no reason to tell quality content from poor content, I’m doing this out of boredom and just scrolling through Reels. And you keep scrolling. Then you don’t ask yourself whether the content you are watching is quality or not.

If a person opens something and sees a particular headline, for example, “Who will win the war — Iran or the United States?” or “Who will be the next president?” — you ask yourself: why do I want to click on this headline and watch? What information interests me, what do I want to get out of it?

• I want to hear the author’s opinion and understand the current situation.
• I want to understand this situation and get another opinion, because it affects my business, my stocks or my investments.
• It affects my opinion of myself on a particular issue — I want to have it confirmed.
• I want to listen to some content so that I can argue with someone even more.
• I want to prove this point of view at home to my husband or my wife later.

So why should I look at this content at all? In the same way, if a person goes to study and get an education — at a university, for example — it is important to ask: why am I really going to university?

• I am going to university to gain certain knowledge and then find a job — and this is the right track for finding work.
• Or it is the right track for developing my social perception of the world.
• Or I am going to university to make new friends and acquaintances.
• Or I am going to university to appease my parents and society, because society believes that studying at university is necessary.

And when we talk about how to choose something of quality for ourselves, it is very important to look further. Suppose I go to university to make friends. Can a person find friends at every university? Of course not. Are they bound to make friends? Of course not. Are they bound to find the right people? Of course not. They can go absolutely anywhere and meet someone who later sets them up or kills them, makes their life worse — sets them up so badly that they could end up in prison because of that person. Or you can meet your future husband or wife at university, friends for life. Or find your future calling at university.

When you ask how to choose the right content for yourself, you need to understand how causes and effects work in the first place.

Suppose a person wants to study artificial intelligence. What content should they study online today? Whom should they trust? This smart person, a brilliant mathematician? Or this businessman with a lot of money? This economist who has an economics degree and sees the situation? Or this politician who understands things politically and perhaps thinks about people? Or this person because you once worked together? Or this person because your friend watches them? Whom should you trust?

If you want to learn business — whom should you trust when it comes to business? A professor who has written sixteen dissertations? A young entrepreneur whose company is worth ten billion dollars? An old entrepreneur who has lived through every era? A senator who has spent his whole life in politics? Or an outside commentator who interviews other people about how business works? Whom should you trust? Or should you trust your wife or husband, who say: I have a feeling you shouldn’t go into this business?

What counts as quality content

What counts as quality content? A friend of my sister recently sent me a message: “Sasha, what do you think about starting a business on Amazon?” I write back: “I have no thoughts about starting a business on Amazon. I can’t help with that question.” And thirty minutes later I think: all right, I’ll answer.

I had already helped this person once, and she doesn’t hear what I say. I think: all right, I’ll help one more time. I write: “You don’t need this business, there is no money there. Period.” And then she sends me a message: “I looked into it anyway, and I still want to do it.” I didn’t answer anything after that.

That was all my advice. She was looking precisely for a course and wanted to pay someone — five, ten, twenty thousand dollars for training plus thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred, two hundred, four hundred thousand dollars. How much do people who don’t succeed usually spend on trying their luck on Amazon? As for those who do succeed — sometimes they hit the right niche at the right time. Accidents happen, but that is probability for the one who succeeds.

It is not a stable way of earning money — this is very important. It is chance.

Just as there are coffee chains worth tens of billions — I don’t know what Starbucks is worth now. Or there are coffee shops that someone sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there is the great mass of coffee shops that brought nobody anything. And there are micro coffee shops that have provided and still provide a steady income.

Go to Italy — there will be an enormous number of cafés. If you ask the people who work there, “This café has been here for thirty or forty years — is it making a profit or a loss?” — the person will look at you and say, “Obviously a profit, if it has been here for thirty years.” The only question is: what kind of profit? And does that profit suit you? So what is a truly quality answer to this question? How do you choose quality content?

How to choose quality content

How do you choose a quality person who talks about personal development? Should they be of a particular gender or age, or live in a particular country? Or should they be precisely the person who will get through to my system and solve my problem? So who are these people?

And we are, after all, talking about an abstract, broad subject. You and I are not discussing how to choose quality content in order to build a rocket for a flight to the Moon: I work at SpaceX and I need to fill a particular gap in my information. In that case we narrow down our knowledge. And who talks about this subject at all?

When I was young, content was not as accessible as it is now. To study a programming language, I would go to the book fair at VDNKh in Minsk — it took place, I don’t know, once a month or so — and ask: “What books do you have about C#?” They would tell me: “There is one book.” And I would buy it. Was I choosing quality content? How was I choosing it?

Although, in essence, when choosing quality content about C#, one could have asked the following questions:

• Do I need content about C# or about programming? Okay, perhaps about programming.
• Do I need content about C# or about business analysis? Maybe not about programming, but about business analysis?
• Do I need content about C# or a book with specific questions and answers? Maybe that is the kind of book I need?
• Do I need specific content about C# or some book that lists links to where I can download particular libraries online?

Because in those years search was very poorly organized, and it was hard to find anything. I remember you would buy some magazine like Khaker — there were magazines like that — and some interesting little article in it would say: “Go to this website, it has an interesting library.” And you go there and download it. Oh, cool! The library changes an image, for example. The task was not to develop your own library but, for example, to download it.

Or do I need content not about C# but content where I can read about different people who used C#? I could read about programmers who worked in a particular field — for example, in telecom, in real estate or in the food industry. And why do I need these people who applied programming in these industries? Do I need content about C# or about automation systems that were built in C#?

Imagine I had met such a person at the fair. I would have asked: “How do I figure out what I need?” He would have said: “Well, why do you want to buy a book?” — “I want to buy a book because a man came to our university and said that C# is the programming language of the future, it is very fashionable and you have to learn it. I remember the teachers doing that, and that’s why I want to study it a bit.” — “Alexander, don’t study C#, study this, because in the future you will open your own IT businesses, and you need to know this information, not the C# programming language.”

For that, one needs to see what kind of person I am, what interests me, who I want to become, who I want to be. Then the other person on the other side has to be a prophet who will give the right advice and recommendation. Or, since you are asking how to choose something correctly, you have to be a prophet about yourself. That is, you have to understand: where are you going? What drives you? What do you want to figure out? Do you even need to study this at all?

How to learn well

Or you have to see in another author a person who can help you understand yourself.

The very best authors are the ones who help you understand yourself.

If you and I look at bloggers, there is an enormous number of bloggers who help intensify your own suffering. There are authors who help intensify hatred toward particular countries or people. There are authors who let you inflate your ego. And there are authors and people who let you understand yourself, develop and apply a certain tool — especially when we are talking about broad applied fields. For example, in terms of getting a broad education — developing a broad perception of reality in yourself. And finding something in that tool for your own life.

Rather than something after which you come home and tell your wife: “Get out, I’ve become the smartest one.” Or write yet another post on Instagram: “You know, today I figured out a super-hyped thing.” Getting information you don’t need. Or intensifying an uncontrollable fear in yourself that you didn’t even realize would grow through these videos.

How information intensifies fear and ego

There are very well-known Russian-speaking bloggers. Among other things, they have started filming a lot about the United States — because there is a war, and because many bloggers are not in Russia. And bloggers who are not in Russia often take a very negative, pointed stance. We now see this even in the film that Oleg Tinkov released — a stance along the lines of “the real Russia is not in Russia.” This is a strange stance, because the real Russia is, of course, in Russia — that is the essence of this place, or of any country. That doesn’t mean Russian people don’t live in other countries. They have lived there and will go on living there. And just as they emigrated a hundred years ago, they will continue to emigrate.

My wife and I often laugh about how many Russians try to fight with Americans but don’t understand that Americans are not fighting with Russians — Americans don’t even understand that they are supposed to fight with Russians. It makes no difference to them at all. As my wife says, they don’t even understand where it is: “Where is that?” They don’t even understand that you have to fly there on a plane. Not because they are uneducated, but because it makes no difference to them.

A Russian person, as Rudolf Steiner said in his books a hundred years ago — even more, a hundred and ten years ago — will have one of two characters: either he will hate his own country and want America, or he will hate America and defend Russia’s interests. This, of course, by no means applies to all Russians.

So there are bloggers who very strongly defend this anti-interest. Yesterday my wife came to me — one blogger had just been in San Francisco, and a friend of hers met with him — and said: “Listen, I recently watched an episode by this blogger, even though I don’t watch or know them. And he was already talking about America very negatively.” And you watch this blogger — and whatever you watch of his, it’s all negative.

You endlessly feel trauma, you feel negation being transmitted to you. And this whole person is in negation, not in love for the place. Can you talk about a place from love — about a bad place? Of course you can.

Can you show the real truth while speaking from love? You can. Then it becomes the real truth.

Then it awakens a feeling of love in a person, so that they have the strength to understand the negative structures while keeping love in themselves, rather than understanding the negative structures while remaining in that otherworldly realm of lies.

How content distorts your perception of reality

It’s like how in the United States they love to show homeless people on the streets of San Francisco. And there are interesting videos from the seventies, when Soviet television showed New York or a decaying America: how America saves on gasoline, lines at the stores, no food. In exactly the same way they show India or any country.

I am about to go to Hawaii with my girls — my wife keeps wanting to go to Hawaii. She has never been there, while I have been there several times because of certain circumstances. And every time everyone talks about Hawaii, my wife included, I sort of protest against her wish to go to Hawaii.

I say: “What do you want to see there?” Because for her Hawaii is that picture on a Bounty wrapper. But anyone who has been on an island from that Bounty wrapper knows that there is nothing wonderful there, apart from one beautiful picture and an enormous number of irritating insects, mosquitoes and merciless weather.

I tell her: “Listen, show me Hawaii.” She says: “A blogger was just in Hawaii, everything there is so wonderful.” I say: “Open it and show me these views right now.” She opens the views for me. I say: “So where are the views here? You are showing me a beach. Our beach here in Half Moon Bay probably even looks more decent.” She says: “You can swim there.” I say: “All right.”

But not everywhere. There is a lot of ocean with rough waves there. There are an enormous number of places where you can’t swim, places that are dirty, where it rains all the time, where there are reefs and rocks in the water and you can’t get in. As for the water temperature — I’ll agree, but as for the quality of the ocean, that endlessly blissful ocean, I have a big question mark about it.

She says: “All right, look how beautiful these other views are: rain falling among palm trees.” I say: “Well, it rained here yesterday too, and we have palms as well — we have palms and redwoods, and it rained.” I am in no way saying that it is bad or good. I tell her: “Do you know that a huge number of parts of Hawaii are run-down, in bad shape, in poverty? Do you know that the infrastructure there is very poor in terms of good restaurants? It’s not exactly a super amazing place to be. In many places it’s a problem to get a taxi.”

A friend and I were there last year; in the evening we left a restaurant and couldn’t get a taxi. We went back into the restaurant and said: “Could somebody call us a taxi?” And it was about a forty-minute walk from there. And the waiter who had served us said: “I’ll drive you home.” And he personally drove us home.

So this is a certain illusion of what is happening. This is very important. There is an illusion in the picture of what is happening.

The key criterion for choosing an author or expert

Do they have the volume of energy for it — or are they conveying something else? They may even convey some strong business experience, yet plant doubt and fear in you for the rest of your life. Because you will spend a great deal of time with them, you will catch that fear, and it will be present in you all the time.

Or a person may convey something inadequate. Why did the notion of “successful success” appear? Because, unlike scientists or professors who lectured tediously at university, saying how complicated everything was and that you would never understand anything there, people began to talk about things in simple language and to say that all of you will succeed. And people, hearing the phrase that everyone will succeed — even though there was a disclaimer: “Some may not succeed” — called it successful success.

Although, in fact, if you and I look at bloggers who even present the news — they are the deceivers. Let’s look at politicians who make statements — they are the deceivers, they are the ones who lie. They ask questions in interviews, they show something in a city — and they deceive, without knowing that country themselves, without understanding it.

Recently I was talking with one person. He tells me: “Alexander, now I advise people to eat a lot of fat along with meat. But before, I advised eating little fat.” So does that mean you ruined an enormous number of lives when you told people to eat lean meat? And now, when you say people should eat fatty meat, you could be wrong too.

So does that mean that you, as a blogger, having come and filmed a video about a particular city or a particular technology, deceived other people and didn’t convey the right meaning to them? You came out and said that AGI would arrive in a year. You said that artificial intelligence would take all the jobs — and because of that someone started drinking and died, families fell apart. Or you said that with the help of artificial intelligence anyone can become anyone and earn millions of dollars. And someone ruined their life because of that, too. Someone made money, but someone definitely ruined their life. Because where there are thousands and tens of thousands of people, there will inevitably be losses and destruction.

I remember a good phrase from Vladimir Konstantinovich Tarasov. It is a very specialized education — the Tallinn School of Management — but once he did an off-site for us: in 2013 we took him to the island of Tenerife for our company. It was my only trip to that island — a very strange one, and you don’t understand what to do there. Although, again, it’s probably like Hawaii.

And he said back then that if you have ten people in your company, you can always figure out what is happening with each person. Perhaps from a business point of view, socially, but from the point of view of people that is untrue, a deception. If you have a hundred people, you will already make a small mistake. If you have ten thousand people, you will certainly make a mistake. And if you run a country or a large number of people, you will one hundred percent make a mistake that affects people’s lives. That is, people will die through your fault — people will always die through your fault. Always! However good a person you are, people will die through your fault.

And here is a very interesting thing: is it always possible to figure things out and find the truth when there are ten people?

You will never figure out ten people, because their lives are complex spiritual constructs.

But this coin has another side: the very fact of death is not a problem, because all people in this world will die. And this is a true law of the Universe. That is the essence of life.

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