Whom to Trust Online: How to Choose Content Without Living Inside Someone Else's Worldview

AVAlexander Volchek

You are asking how to find quality content. There is an enormous amount of content now, including educational content and videos. How do you recognize quality content, choose it, approach it, and make sense of it? When you approach any information, whether it is a video, a course you have joined, or a person you are listening to, the most important question comes right at the beginning. It is the question that lets you look at what is happening and discover the whole truth: why do you want to study this content at all, and why did you open it? Most of the time, if you are scrolling through Reels, for example, you will see that you opened the feed mechanically, through a psychophysical habit, and do not actually want to get anything from it. You are doing it automatically, like an addiction, or perhaps out of boredom. Then you can tell yourself, “I have no reason to distinguish quality content from poor content. I am doing this out of boredom, just scrolling through Reels,” and keep scrolling. Then you are not asking whether the content you watch is good or bad. But suppose you see a particular headline: “Who will win a 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 from it?” Perhaps I want to hear the author's opinion or understand the current situation and what is happening. I want to understand it and hear another opinion because it affects my business, my thinking, my stocks or investments, or my opinion of myself in a particular area. I want confirmation. Or I want to listen to something so I can argue more with someone, or prove this point to my husband or wife at home. Why do I want to look at this content at all? It is the same when someone goes to study and get an education, at a university, for example. Ask yourself why you are really going to university. Am I going to find a job, to gain certain knowledge so I can then find a job? Is that the right path to finding work? Or is it the right path to developing my perception of the social world? Am I going to make new friends and acquaintances? Or to appease my parents and society, because they believe I need to go to university?

When we talk about choosing quality content for ourselves, it is important to look further. Suppose I go to university to make friends. Can someone find friends at every university? Of course not. Are they guaranteed to make friends? Of course not. Are they guaranteed to find the right people? Of course not. You can go absolutely anywhere and meet someone who later sets you up, kills you, makes your life worse, or gets you into such trouble that you end up in prison because of them. Or you can meet your future husband or wife at university, your lifelong friends, or discover your future calling. So when you ask how to choose the right content, you need to understand how causes and effects work. Suppose someone wants to study artificial intelligence. What content should they study online today to learn about it? Whom should they trust? This brilliant mathematician? Or this businessperson with a lot of money?

Should they trust this economist, who has an economics degree and sees things from that perspective? This politician, who understands politics and perhaps thinks about people? Or this person because you once worked together, or another because your friend watches them? Whom should you trust? If you want to learn about business, whom should you trust: this professor who has written sixteen dissertations, this young entrepreneur whose company is worth ten billion dollars, an old entrepreneur who has lived through every era, a senator who has spent their whole life in politics, or an outside commentator who interviews people about how business works? Whom should you trust? Or should you trust your wife or husband, who says, “I have a feeling you should not go into this business”? What is quality content? A friend of my sister recently messaged me: “Sasha, what do you think about starting a business on Amazon?” I wrote, “I have no thoughts about starting a business on Amazon. I cannot help with that question.” Thirty minutes later, I thought, “All right, I will answer.”

I had helped this person before, and she does not hear what I tell her. I thought, “All right, I will help one more time.” I wrote, “You do not need this business. There is no money in it. Period.” She sent another message: “I have looked into it anyway, and I still want to do this.” I did not reply after that. That was my whole piece of advice. She wanted to find a course and pay someone—I do not know—five, ten, or twenty thousand dollars for training, plus thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred, two hundred, or four hundred thousand dollars. How much do people who do not succeed usually spend trying things on Amazon? Those who do succeed may have happened to enter the right niche at the right time. Accidents happen, but that is chance for the person who succeeds. It is not a stable way to earn money. That is very important: it is chance. There are coffee chains worth tens of billions, probably—I do not know what Starbucks is worth now, a billion dollars. There are coffee businesses someone sold for hundreds of millions. Then there is the great mass of coffee shops that brought no one anything, and tiny coffee shops that have provided and continue to provide a steady income.

Go to Italy and you will find an enormous number of cafés. Ask someone, “You have been operating this café here for thirty or forty years. Does it make a profit or a loss?” They will look at you and say, “Obviously a profit, if it has been here for thirty years.” The question is how much profit, and whether that amount suits you. So what would a truly useful answer to this question be? How do you choose quality content? How do you choose a good person to listen to about personal development? Must they be a particular gender or age, or live in a particular country? Or must they be the person who can get through to my system and resolve my particular issue? Who are the people who get through to my system and resolve my issue? We are discussing an abstract, broad subject. We are not talking about choosing quality content to build a rocket for a flight to the Moon: “I work at SpaceX and need to fill a particular gap in my information.” In that case, we narrow the range of knowledge. Who talks about this subject at all?

When I was young, content was not nearly as accessible as it is now. To study a programming language, I would go to a book fair at VDNKh in Minsk. It took place perhaps once a month, I do not remember. I would ask, “What books do you have about C#?” “Here is one book.” I bought it. Was I choosing quality content? How was I choosing it? In fact, I could have asked a different question about choosing C# content: do I need content about C#, or about programming? All right, perhaps programming. Do I need content about C#, or about business analysis? Perhaps not programming, but business analysis. Do I need content about C#, or a book with specific questions and answers? Perhaps that is the book I need. Or do I need a book listing links where I can download particular libraries online? Searching was very difficult in those years, and things were hard to find. I remember buying Khaker magazine or another magazine, and an interesting little article would say, “Visit this website; it has an interesting library.”

You go to the site and download it. “Oh, cool!” The library changes an image, for example.

The library changes an image, for example. The task was not to develop your own library, but to download one. Or perhaps I need content not about C# itself, but about different people who have used it. I could read about programmers working in telecommunications, real estate, or the food industry. Why do I need those people, people who have applied programming in those industries? Do I need content about C#, or about automation systems built in C#? Imagine I had met someone like that at the book fair. I would ask, “How do I figure out what I need?” They would say, “Why do you want to buy a book?” “Because someone came to our university and said C# was the programming language of the future, that it was very fashionable and we should study it. I remember our teachers doing that, so I want to explore it.” “Alexander, study this instead of C#, because you will start your own IT businesses in the future, and you need this information, not the C# programming language.”

To do that, someone would need to see what kind of person I am, what interests me, and who I want to become and be. The person on the other side would have to be a prophet to give me the right advice and recommendation. Or, since you are asking how to choose something correctly, you need to be a prophet about yourself. You need to understand where you are going, what drives you, what you want to understand, and whether you need to study this at all. Or you need to recognize an author who can help you understand yourself. The best authors are those who help you understand yourself. Look at bloggers: an enormous number help intensify your own suffering. Some help intensify hatred of particular countries or people. Some let you strengthen your ego. Others help you understand yourself and develop and apply a particular tool, especially in broad, practical fields. For example, a broad education can develop your ability to perceive reality broadly, so you can find something in that tool for your own life.

Something other than coming home and telling your wife, “Get out. I am the smartest person now.” Or writing another Instagram post: “You know, today I figured out this incredibly trendy thing.” Acquiring information you do not need. Or strengthening an uncontrollable fear that you did not even realize these videos would intensify. There are very well-known Russian-language bloggers who have begun making a lot of content about the United States. There is a war, and many bloggers are no longer in Russia; those who are outside Russia often take a very negative stance. We see it now, even in the film Oleg Tinkov released: this idea that “the real Russia is outside Russia.” That is a strange position, because the real Russia is, of course, in Russia. That is the essence of the place, or of any country. It does not mean Russian people do not live in other countries. They have always done so and will continue to. They emigrated a hundred years ago and will keep emigrating. My wife and I often laugh about how many Russians try to fight Americans without understanding that Americans are not fighting Russians. Americans do not even understand that they are supposed to fight Russians.

It makes no difference to them. As my wife says, they ask, “Where is that?” They do not even realize you have to fly there. Not because they are uneducated, but because it does not matter to them. Rudolf Steiner said in his books a hundred years ago—more than a hundred, a hundred and ten years ago—that a Russian person would have one of two dispositions: either hate their own country and long for America, or hate America and defend Russia's interests. This certainly does not apply to all Russians, by any means. But there are bloggers who fiercely defend this oppositional stance. Yesterday my wife came to me and said that one blogger had been in San Francisco and met with a friend of hers. She said, “Listen, I recently watched an episode by this blogger. I do not normally watch or know them. He was already talking about America very negatively.” You watch this blogger, and whatever you watch is negative.

You continually feel the hurt and the negativity being conveyed to you. This whole person is caught up in negation rather than love for the place. Can you speak about a place with love, even a troubled place? Of course you can. Can you show the real truth while speaking from love? You can. Then it becomes real truth. It awakens a sense of love in the listener, giving them the strength to understand the negative structures while keeping that love, instead of understanding those structures and remaining in that otherworldly realm of lies. Lies. Think of the way people like to show homeless people on the streets of San Francisco in the United States. There are interesting videos from the 1970s when Soviet television showed New York, a collapsing America, America saving on gasoline, lines outside stores, or a lack of food. People show India or any other country in the same way. I am about to go to Hawaii with my girls. My wife has been wanting to go; she has never been, while I have been several times because of particular circumstances. Whenever people talk about Hawaii, including my wife, I find myself resisting her wish to go there.

I ask, “What do you want to see there?” To her, Hawaii is the picture on a Bounty wrapper. But anyone who has been on an island, inside that Bounty-wrapper picture, knows there is nothing wonderful there apart from one beautiful image, enormous numbers of irritating insects and mosquitoes, and merciless weather. I say, “Listen, show me something in Hawaii.” She says, “This blogger just went to Hawaii. Everything there is so wonderful.” “Open it and show me these views right now.” She opens them. I say, “Where are the views? You are showing me a beach. The beach here at Half Moon Bay probably looks a bit better.” “You can swim there.” “All right.” But not everywhere. There are many places with rough ocean waves where you cannot swim. Many places are dirty. Many have constant rain. Many have reefs, rocks in the water, so you cannot get in. I agree about the water temperature. But as for the ocean being this endlessly delightful ocean, I have serious questions about that.

She says, “All right, look how beautiful these other views are. Rain falling among the palm trees.” I say, “It rained here yesterday too. We have palms as well, palms and redwoods, all in the rain.” I am certainly not saying it is good or bad. I am saying, “Do you know that many parts of Hawaii are run-down, in poor condition and poverty? Do you know that the infrastructure for good restaurants is very poor? It is not as though it is some absolutely incredible place to be. In many places, getting a taxi is a problem.” A friend and I were there last year. We left a restaurant in the evening and could not get a taxi. We went back in and asked whether someone could call us one. It was about a forty-minute walk. The man who had served us said, “I will drive you home.” And he personally drove us home. There is an illusion about what is happening. That is very important: an illusory picture of reality. So whenever we watch someone online, let alone enroll in an educational institution, it is important to look at whether this person conveys freedom to people and gives them the opportunity to understand themselves.

Do they have the energy for that, or are they conveying something else? They may even be sharing—

They may even share substantial business experience, yet plant doubt or fear in you for the rest of your life. You will spend a great deal of time with them and pick up that fear; it will stay with you all the time. Or someone may convey a distorted picture of reality. Why did people coin the phrase “successful success”? Compared with scientists or professors who spoke tediously at university, saying how complicated everything was and how you would never understand any of it, other people began explaining things simply and saying, “All of you can succeed.” People heard that everyone would succeed—even though there was a disclaimer, “Some people may not succeed”—and called it “successful success.” Yet if we look at bloggers who even report the news, they are deceivers. Look at politicians making statements: they are deceivers; they lie. They ask questions in interviews or show something in a city, and they mislead people while not knowing or understanding that country themselves. I was recently talking with someone who said, “Alexander, I now recommend that people eat a lot of fat with meat.

I used to recommend eating very little fat.” Does that mean you ruined enormous numbers of lives by telling people to eat lean meat, and could also be wrong now when you tell them to eat fatty meat? Does it mean that, as a blogger, you visited and filmed a particular city or a particular technology and deceived people, failing to convey the right meaning? You announced that AGI would arrive in a year. You said artificial intelligence would take all the jobs; someone started drinking because of that, died, and families fell apart. Or you said anyone could become anything they wanted and make millions of dollars with artificial intelligence. Someone ruined their life because of that too. Some people made money, but others certainly destroyed their lives. Where there are thousands or tens of thousands of people, there will inevitably be losses and destruction. I remember a good phrase from Vladimir Konstantinovich Tarasov. His Tallinn School of Management offers a very specialized education. In 2013, we once brought him to Tenerife for a company retreat. That was my only trip to that island. It was very strange; you do not understand what there is to do there. Although, again, perhaps it is like Hawaii.

He said then that if you have ten people in your company, you can always understand what is happening with each person. From a business or social standpoint, perhaps, but in terms of people that is untrue, a deception. With a hundred people, you will already make a small mistake. With ten thousand, you will certainly make a mistake. If you govern a country or a large number of people, you will one hundred percent make a mistake that affects people's lives. People will die because of you. Always. However good a person you are, people will die because of you. Here is something interesting: can you always understand everything and find the truth when there are ten people? You can never fully understand ten people, because their lives are complex spiritual structures. But there is another side to this. The other side is that death itself is not a problem, because everyone in this world will die. That is a real law of the Universe. That is the essence of life.