Reclaiming Your Attention: How Kira Shishkin Is Disrupting Media with AI-Powered News

Jeffro (00:02.511)
If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by the news or unsure of what sources to trust, this episode is for you. Today, I’m joined by Kira Shishkin, the CEO of informed.now, an SMS news briefing service that keeps people informed without feeling drained. With this tool, Kira is trying to help users reclaim their attention in this era of outrage cycles and algorithmic manipulation that we’re in. But he’s a four-time entrepreneur, Forbes 30 under 30 alum, and a Stanford-trained strategist and he has lot of insights in media mindfulness, AI ethics, and what it really means to build a product that puts users first. So I’m excited to talk to him. And regardless of what type of business you run, your attention is your most valuable asset. And today we’re going to talk about how to protect that and why that matters more than ever now. So welcome to the show, Kira.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (00:49.602)
Jeff, thank you for having me. That was a very generous introduction.

Jeffro (00:53.542)
Well, I’m excited. I think this is so important. know personally, even this morning I was looking up minimalist phones and ways I can kind of help myself not get addicted to my phone so much. actually keep my phone in black and white mode so it’s not as enticing to look at. But you specifically, your app is focused around news. And obviously that’s one source of input that people can spend a lot of time on and the doom scrolling and everything. So I think maybe we should start with a topic that a lot of people are gonna resonate with, which is, you you’ve called it attention terrorism. That’s like how today’s media works. So tell us what you mean by that and how that impacts us as leaders in our businesses.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (01:34.445)
I mean, absolutely. We use a strong word on purpose because what is happening is sort of in front of us and we’ve put up with it for so long that we think there are no alternatives. But it is attention terrorism. We used to have this concept of the attention economy, which is just the realization that companies are in the business of commodifying our attention and selling it to each other. And, you know, that was 10 years ago. Now we live in a world of attention terrorism where our attention as consumers as everyday people is being hijacked, right? Being hijacked through clickbait, through sensationalism, through ways of capturing attention in sort of inevitable ways. And you show something frightening or something scary, something that provokes outrage. And then you capture the person’s attention and then you hold it hostage, right? You hold it hostage for as long as possible by engaging, retaining, trying to keep the person in the realm of your media business and that’s what we call attention terrorism. mean, what is it, if not the hijacking and the keeping hostage of your attention, what better word should we use? And this is true across all aspects of the media landscape, from entertainment to social to information, but it is especially problematic in the information media world, where we come for facts, where we come for credible information, we come to get informed not to be entertained, not to be influenced, not to be drained or overwhelmed or solicited. But we don’t really have those options as everyday Americans, our options are very few. You watch news that misleads you. You watch news that influences you one way or another. And I mean, that spirit and this observation is what we’re solving against and solving to improve.

Jeffro (03:25.721)
Yeah, well, there’s so many different sources. Like we said, it’s hard to know who to trust. In the same social media feed, we can see someone who’s making something up and someone else who is a journalist with integrity. And you can’t always tell. the person who’s making stuff up might be way better at holding your attention. It doesn’t mean that their information is more true or more accurate. It’s just that they’ve gotten better at that particular skill. So it is interesting to know that that’s happening.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (03:52.652)
And we see this, right? We see this in social media left and right. The information that goes viral does not need to be accurate. It does not need to be factual. It just needs to be catchy. And social media really brought that to the surface, but that’s been the case across all of media for longer than either of us have been alive. That’s just the way humans interact. We spread information without

Jeffro (03:54.243)
Right, and even when we’re aware of it. Yeah.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (04:21.26)
the utmost concern for its accuracy. so virality, is sort of the ultimate force that megaphones information across community, is divorced or disconnected from accuracy. And I think right now we can’t sacrifice accuracy. We live in the world of so much transformative change very quickly, and staying informed is a priority. It should be a priority for lot of people and we don’t really have the information infrastructure, so to speak, to prioritize both the spread and distribution of information alongside its accuracy, its factuality, its credibility.

Jeffro (05:00.495)
Yeah, well, I think there’s something about us as humans that we want to be the source of information for somebody else. And so that might be why we’re quick to share things that are interesting or new or different or shocking. And we’re like, did you know this? Because we get a little hit of dopamine when they hadn’t heard about it. They’re like, no, what, really? Like now suddenly I’m helping them, blessing them with this information that they didn’t know before. And so we all want to feel informed. But I think at a certain point, you know, we’re just overwhelmed because there’s so much out there trying to sift through everything. So in your opinion, what’s the difference between consuming news and being informed and how does that impact us?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (05:40.843)
absolutely. think news consumption has become synonymous with consumption of news commentary in America. You’re not really consuming news itself, you’re consuming discussion of news, right? So whether that’s talking heads on TV, discussing an issue, right? Talking about it. Or if it’s a, you know, a sub stack that you’re subscribed to, or some sort of you know, a pundit, whether that’s a an influencer, creator type, or a more established traditional anchor.

There is always some character, some personality regurgitating the news for you and giving you inevitably a spin as to is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? How exciting is this? Is this the worst thing in the world? There’s always that layer of commentary by default in American news consumption. And that’s really not the same thing as being informed. Being informed is the outcome of research, right? And very few people have the time the energy, right, the energy to do it, of actually researching an issue, right, of figuring out, well, CNN is saying one thing, Fox News is saying something else, right, we’ve got New York Times, Washington Post, everyone’s saying something, what is the, what is actually going on, right? The outcome of you actually figuring that out and knowing what the facts are, that’s being informed. But for most people, that’s a three hour per day commitment, right? For a lay person who’s not a trained researcher,

That will take hours per day to just figure out if what you’re seeing on TV is real. If what you’re hearing on the radio is actually happening and is happening the way it’s being described. It’s exhausting.

Jeffro (07:20.375)
Yeah, well, and like you said, it takes so long not just to know the information and what’s accurate, but then how do I feel about this? So we shortcut it by taking the opinions of the social media influencers or the satirical news shows and kind of just hang that on our shirt, like, okay, this is my opinion. I’m so clever because I had this insight. But really, you’re just borrowing that one and spreading it because it makes you feel good.

So yeah, it is kind of almost a lost art. We talk about being informed, but we look for the shortcuts.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (07:55.102)
Yeah, we want people to make up our minds, right? We are open, inadvertently, when we’re busy, when we’re tired, when we’re feeling lazy, just because of our circumstance. Hey, I worked the whole day, very exhausted, I don’t have time, I have to go take care of my children, and it’s like, I don’t have time to do this research. So if someone like Stephen Colbert or Trevor Noah, which are, by the way, comedians, right? If they suggest a perspective, and everyone’s laughing and I can tell that other people are watching this too and they agree with this perspective, right? Then I’ll just borrow this. I’ll borrow this made-up mind so that I can be part of this circle of people that I like and I relate to. And perfect, they’ve done the research for me and they’ve done the interpretation of what that means for me. That’s not being informed. It’s also not making up your own mind. And it’s okay if that’s what you want to do.

You’re just not in the type of person that we serve. We serve independent thinkers who are yearning for solutions to help them make up their own minds.

Jeffro (09:05.622)
Yeah, and so that begs the question though, now what makes you not just another source that someone decided to trust, right? So can you talk about how you’re filtering the news you share and how you’re curating as well?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (09:20.529)
Absolutely. We really, you know, you could describe our work through like a platform, an app, a product, a website, it’s a service, but it’s really none of those things. What we are pioneering, we’re putting forward, we’re proposing is essentially a new news reading habit, right? It’s a new habit for a new generation of readers who care about the world, Americans who see themselves as global citizens, and yet they are frustrated with the tools at their disposal. They are frustrated and sort of resigned from legacy news media that misleads and misinforms us. And so what we are is a news reading habit. Now, how is it different? Well, one, instead of you having to make the time to go and research and get the news through what we’re doing, we bring the news to you. And how do we do it? Not through email not through a website, not through some sort of, you know, other, not through TV or radio. We text it to you via SMS. We are sort of the News by Text service in that way. And in the texting of it to you, we both stay loyal to the format of a text where it’s extremely concise. It’s very, very brief so that it isn’t demanding more time from you. It actually is just giving you exactly like what you have to know if you only spent a minute per day reading news. And if you want to learn more, we give you the tooling to do that. But if you only had a minute, here is how to make the most of that time in terms of getting informed. So back to specifics, it is a text message that’s sent directly to you as a user, and it curates world-changing news, things that aren’t just local drama or a localized phenomenon, localized tragedy, whatever it is.

It’s surfacing the most world-changing news, where we’re looking at the large-scale economic movements, whether that’s unemployment or inflation or trade agreements, or large-scale cultural movements, like the No Kings protest, or the large cultural movements around the Middle East and in Europe and Latin America. We’re looking at things across the board, but we’re always asking ourselves the question of, does this change the world?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (11:45.896)
And we prioritize the most world-changing news in that single text that keeps you informed by giving you the facts of the what, where and when without suggesting an interpretation. Our solution is almost in saying less, but saying the right things that will keep you informed without influencing you.

Jeffro (12:08.672)
So obviously you talk about you’re picking things that will change the world in some form. How do you whittle it down though? Because there’s sometimes a lot of things happening. And then there’s the question of, you most platforms let you choose preferences. Like I care about these things or I care about this country news, but you don’t have any preference selection, right? You guys just decide and say, it is. What was kind of the decision process behind that?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (12:38.706)
Yeah, we, you know, our whole curation is designed around significance, which is essentially the question that I proposed earlier was how much does this change the world? And that breaks out into two sub questions, which is how many people are being affected and by how much like what is the intensity of the change in their life, which is usually, you know, captured through loss or gain of freedom, of safety or security or of optionality? Am I able to now purchase more things? Am I able to select between multiple options? Is my family safe in this country? So these large life-changing events that would change the life of a family, of a generation, of a huge group of people. And so the fundamental questions are essentially, if I was to put them together into a single one, is how much does this event affect how many people?

So that sort of mix of the question is what is our filter? And so it isn’t really sort of subjective. It’s a model of significance that could be referred to as the utilitarian model of how many people are affected how much. And that’s what we stay loyal to. The reason we don’t offer hyper-personalization per person is because we find there’s two observations there. One is actually most people crave to know the most important things and they happen to be the same no matter like kind of who you are. Number two is if you’re really interested in a certain field for example you’re really interested in philosophy right or perhaps like local news in Hyderabad in India there are better publications that will give you much more specialized specific insight than we ever could and frankly a third reason it’s a bit of a philosophical on our side is we don’t like to create echo chambers and I think that is also part of the problem of sort of like the current media. It enables you to create an echo chamber of your own. And I think that’s very dangerous for our culture, for our society, for our country. When you read the news, you shouldn’t be able to control what’s in it always, because if you are, you will have blind spots. You’ll have things that just don’t fit there and you’ll create this echo chamber that will inform you in a very particular way. When you read the news, you should be open to

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (15:04.247)
hearing something you didn’t expect, learning about something new, but that is world changing. And so that’s kind of how we broadly paint our curation approach.

Jeffro (15:16.159)
So, I mean, I understand all that. I think that’s a good approach, especially for people who want to be informed citizens. I think the natural next step though would be like getting industry specific because you talked about this being for business owners and decision makers who often are very focused in a certain area, right? So if I run a manufacturing plant and I want to stay on top of what’s happening in that industry with regulations or I don’t know embargoes, anything that happens to affect me, the question is no longer how what is changing the world is what’s going to change my world because that allows the decision maker to stay focused on the things that matter using the same principles of not having bias one way or the other, just getting the facts. But I could see that being a very useful tool as well, even if you got one text for world news and one for my industry.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (16:07.661)
I love that you mentioned and I think you’re right. We’re right now in this stage of ruthless prioritization of focusing on our flagship product, which is the global citizen priorities. But we do actually have live tests out in the market right now of theme-specific coverages. They are not fully publicly available just yet, although there’s someone who’s interested in testing, yourself included. We’re happy to welcome beta testers to the product but we are developing thematic focus informed. essentially, informed.now, healthcare, informed.now, real estate, informed.now, technology, maybe perhaps even, we have not launched this, informed.now, San Francisco or New York, like city-specific focus. So that is sort of on the roadmap. What isn’t is the hyper-personalization of like, Jephro chooses exactly the news he wants and Kira chooses exactly the news that he wants. Like that is not quite on the roadmap for like a range of reasons, some of which I mentioned, but the thematic focuses is coming soon.

Jeffro (17:18.526)
Okay, that makes sense. And that way, because I do think there’s value there in this approach, right? Especially if we’re talking about protecting our attention and our focus and everything, you know, this is just a simple way to do that. Let AI and your algorithm look at the sources, you know, bring it together, strip out the bias, say, here’s what’s important and what you need to know. Great. That seems like a good use of technology because it allows me to not get sucked down these rabbit holes. And I can focus on what matters.

Jeffro (17:51.122)
So, I mean, this is a good habit to have. Obviously, entrepreneurs have a lot of habits. We talk about morning routines, leadership frameworks, and all this. We’ve kind of touched on information hygiene too. This is a way to kind of help with that, at least in the news side of things. Are there other practices that you have, other habits that you personally follow that help you stay sharp without getting sucked into all the different shiny objects that are out there?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (18:16.899)
Well, I’m always asking myself the question of where is my attention being hijacked? And that can be obviously out in the wild when you’re consuming media or interacting with a product or a service, whether, you I feel like we live in a world that is constantly trying to hijack our attention. And so I’m always in the habit of auditing and assessing where in my life is that happening? And how can I, you know, evaluate whether I desire that? Like, do I want to give my attention up?

Right, so I think that’s one habit that’s definitely very top of mind for me is always like reassessing where is my attention being grabbed and am I comfortable with that? Right? Am I comfortable watching TV and sort of being like led by it? Right? Am I comfortable scrolling on my phone and not really being in control because the algorithmic TikTok or Instagram feed is in control. But it also happens in meetings. Like we’re always looking to Optimized internally for like do we need to have this meeting do we need to have this you know encounter? We need to have this event. So always I think you know keeping a very keen eye on Attention safeguarding beyond just media consumption, but like across all of your of your life all of my life I think another habit that I just personally like put a lot of you trust in is I’m looking to always be in community always be surrounded by community and always be sort of in a relationship with the community, not just isolated relationships, but try to be connected with people. I think we live in a world that creates easy access to isolation. And it’s important to be intentional about the choice of like, you actually want to isolate? Do you want to spend more time with your Xbox or with your phone or with your TV? Or are you actually missing human touch? and you’re trying to replace that in an isolated way, I think it’s really important to be part of a community. Whether that’s joining one or building one of your own, I think that’s really, really important. So I actually curate and cultivate a community of my own for many years now. It’s called Circuit. And it’s sort of the friend group I’ve always dreamed to have. It’s a group of people who are supportive of each other and who are looking to

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (20:39.5)
to build trust and to invest in each other. I think that is a social, personal and business habit that, you know, it’s a practice that’s worth making a habit out of.

Jeffro (20:53.148)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And another thing I was thinking is with this approach to consuming media news, it’s obviously stripped down. And I think that will prevent a lot of just the default outrage, right? The reaction approach, because it’s not as sensationalized. And so if we have more people consuming news this way, rather than just the knee-jerk reaction of, what, can’t believe they did that but they’re listening to the interpretation, right? Which jumped to an extreme maybe. I think that would be a good thing because hopefully then people wouldn’t get fired up over nothing and it would save a lot of wasted effort. Do you agree?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (21:36.579)
100%.

Jeffro (21:39.388)
Do you call that media mindfulness or do you have a term for this?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (21:45.825)
Yeah, I think I’ve called it multiple things over the years. think media mindfulness is a nice one because it doesn’t necessarily suggest media minimalism as a solution. I think that is a solution for a lot of people. It’s like, hey, if I’m being overwhelmed with content, if I’m being over-served on content, media, whether that’s news media or another sort of genre right? The natural response is like resignation. Like, okay, well, I had too much, I essentially overdosed on media consumption, and now I want to sort of step away from that. I think it’s, it’s hard sometimes to motivate people to return to being informed to like keeping in touch with the world they inhabit. One of the ways we’ve been successful with doing is we call this media minimalism, which is this idea of like, hey, you don’t need to read much, you don’t need to be, you don’t need to go back to that overwhelmed state but we just consume the bare minimum, like the very, very minimal, the most essentials, right? And that’s been successful with lot of people, bringing them back into sort of the world of caring. Media mindfulness to me is like next level evolution of that. It’s like someone who’s already experienced media minimalism, like, okay, like I’m comfortable consuming media, I just need to be really intentional about what kind of media I’m consuming, comfortable consuming more.

I’ve kind of healed the scar of media overwhelm and information overload and I’m now comfortable consuming a little bit more. But I’m going to be very intentional, very mindful around what that is. And so if I’m entertainment media, maybe I will limit that to certain sort of hours or certain type of platforms. Like I would get on Instagram, but I wouldn’t get on TikTok because TikTok is a death sentence of your attention. In the information media world, For us, that’s the answer has been informed. We’re built informed for ourselves, for people like us and people who are seeking information efficiency in the news media space. And to us, you know, all these decisions that I’ve sort of painted just now, that’s media mindfuckers. Being intentional, not just, you know, being exposed to media, not just letting that happen, but really consciously curating what are you consuming, both across entertainment

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (24:04.723)
social and information like news media.

Jeffro (24:08.921)
Yeah, sounds like this, know, informed.now is kind of the middle ground. So you don’t go extreme like, I don’t read any news, but you’re also not overwhelmed. You could just, okay, I at least can stay, I know what’s happening, but I’m not, you know, driving myself crazy. So I like that. And you’ve called this a form of AI used for good, because I assume you’re using AI to help curate this. But I was curious to ask, what do you think is an opportunity to undo some of the karma that’s been caused by poorly applied AI.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (24:40.705)
Yeah, I mean, think we are just in the early innings of seeing both the good that AI can can facilitate and the bad that AI can can can cause. I think AI adoption is a little faster among the bad actors than among the good actors, which is, I guess, kind of intuitive, like it makes sense. But, you know, how can we undo some of the damage? I feel like specifically in the world of news media, there is sort of a

Jeffro (24:47.61)
Mm-hmm.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (25:10.713)
dichotomy of one side of the media world leveraging AI to create noise, to create more verbosity, to create faster content that’s not necessarily worthwhile content. It’s almost like flooding the channel with regurgitated word vomit pieces, AI slop, vomit and I think that’s very dangerous, right? It’s like, you know, as soon as something happens, for example, like a reputable reporter, for example, Reuters, right, publishes an article about something and there are bad actors who will leverage AI to take that content and rephrase it with a certain bias on top of it and do it at a speed that is very, very fast, right? Maybe they control multiple channels. Maybe they’ll leverage socials to do that. And like that is a use of AI that is malicious and that is sort of, you know, that’s gonna have consequences, it has consequences already, and that’s something we really want be aware of and safeguard against. So the other side, the side that we are on, clearly, is leveraging the eye to denoise the muse, to tease apart, okay, there’s a lot of words, which ones matter, which ones are truthful, which ones are accurate. And that is a matter of agentic scraping right, reading a lot of content, ingesting a lot of content real time to evaluate, okay, we read 300 articles about, you know, the Syrian leaders visit to Trump this week, right? So what among them is commonly agreed upon truths? What among them are the most frequently used words by which publications kind of like seeing, analyzing what is, what is the narrative that’s being spun? And how can we recognize that narrative and neutralize it by teasing apart things that we know to be true, that we can verify and cross-reference to be true. And how can we just surface those elements? So it’s like one side creates noise using AI, one side ourselves, including probably led by ourselves, is letting AI declutter and remove the noise from news media.

Jeffro (27:31.66)
Do you, so when you’re analyzing all these different articles and things, do you take into account the sources and weigh them? Because like Ad Fontes media, for example, has their media bias chart where they rank all the different news outlets by how reliable they are or how extreme they are. And so is that something that you would look at to break ties or even just to disregard certain sources altogether?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (27:55.488)
Totally. then Ed Fontes, I think, has done a great job and we follow them closely. We have a secret weapon, which is sort of like, you know, in the conversation around like, okay, who’s credible, who’s not credible, there’s always gray area. And there’s always this confusion around like, okay, well, I don’t think the New York Times is credible or someone saying, I think they’re the most credible publication, right? It’s like, there’s always this debate. There’s almost like a partisanship around picking your favorite news sources.

Our secret weapon is very obvious, and that is that we rely on primary sources, meaning we don’t just, we’re not just going to go to CNBC to tell us about inflation. We’re going to go to the Federal Reserve to tell us about inflation. We’re not going to go to the Associated Press, which had a lot of run-ins with the president right now, to tell us about what’s going on in the White House. We’re going to go to the White House itself and see, okay, well, what are you guys saying?not saying is whatever he says truth, but what you’re saying is literally from the horse’s mouth, that is the statement of the White House. We’re not going to listen to the Wall Street Journal around what’s happening on Wall Street, right? Ironically so, because we can’t trust them, right? We’re going to look at primary sources, which is the central bank, right? Which is commissioners, which is governors, presidents, government organizations, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we’re going to look directly at what is the ground truth of what is the Supreme Court saying, right? Instead of saying, instead of Fox battling CNN on the topic of what’s the Supreme Court doing, we’re just going to go to the Supreme Court itself, read the ruling, and tell you, okay, here’s what the Supreme Court is actually saying. And so a large and growing fraction of our sources

I think I believe it’s something upwards of two thirds now, because it varies on a daily basis. But two thirds on a given day is primary source information, where when you click sort of the source behind the summary that’s provided to you, you’re not just going to be thrown to a reporter or a journalist, you’re sent directly to the horse’s mouth. You get to meet the horse yourself. And I think that’s really important because no one else does that. No publication is going to take you to the primary source. Definitely have not seen that.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (30:20.971)
And that’s a big secret weapon, double leverage.

Jeffro (30:24.823)
Well, I love that you’re doing that. And I think that is so important. And that sounds like the best way to do it, honestly, to filter through the noise and the interpretations to get to the core of what’s actually happening. So I appreciate you coming on the show today. We are getting to the end of our time. But I hope you continue to do this type of work and helping people have options to get accurate news, whether that’s global citizenship type news or even industry specific once you get there and things like that. So keep on doing that. It’s always a bit sobering when we realize just how much information is out there, how much it consumes us and shapes the way we respond and act in the world. So I think this is really important to help us maintain our own independence, just mentally and just making our choices every day. So for those of you listening, if you want to try Inform.now for yourself, you can go to Inform.now in your browser and get signed up. They’ve got a free trial. You can check it out. So last question for you.

Kira, if there’s one change that a business owner could make this week to kind of reclaim their attention and lead more intentionally, what would you suggest for them?

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (31:32.478)
You know, I believe it’s just a simple and I love that question. Thank you, Jeff. I think it’s really comes down to as simple as like what you measure, you wind up optimizing. Right. I feel like it’s a well accepted truth in the business world and just, you know, do an audit, you know, see if you can lay out on paper, what sources do you consume on a daily basis? Just like make a list. You may be surprised by how many or how few they’re on this list. And, you know, you might be surprised as to what they are.

What are you paying attention to on a daily basis? Do an attention audit and you’ll be surprised what you can learn and what you can optimize.

Jeffro (32:08.501)
That’s great advice, guys. Thanks again for being here, Kira. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps people discover the show and how to achieve digital dominance without losing their sanity. So that’s it for today. Thanks again, Kira. Take care, and we’ll see you all next time.

Kira Shishkin (CEO of informed) (32:25.981)
Thank you for having me.