Transcript
Speaker: on zencastr Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. In this episode of The Independent Minds, I'm meeting Kira Shishkin, the founder of Informed.now, the news concierge service that aims to beat misinformation overload.
Speaker: As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr, because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make every stage of the podcast production and distribution process so easy.
Speaker: Regardless of whether you are an experienced podcaster or just starting out, I recommend that you use the link in the description to visit Zencastr.com and take advantage of the built-in discount.
Speaker: Now that I have told you how wonderful Zencastr is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: and probably good enough to share with your friends, family and work colleagues as well. As with every episode of the Independent Minds, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
Speaker: to- Today's Independent Mind is Kira Shiskin, the founder of informed.now, the news concierge service that aims to beat misinformation overload.
Speaker: Kira is a four-time serial entrepreneur, strategic advisor and investor in the technology industries. His experience spans investment banking, corporate strategy and private equity investments in category-defining ventures.
Speaker: He attended the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Stanford University. Kira has also been included in the Forbes 30 under 30 list Originally from Ukraine Kira has also lived in Israel and now lives in San Francisco in California I have not been to Ukraine or Israel but I have been to San Francisco If I ever get the opportunity to travel to any of these three places in the future, I will use my membership of the Ultimate Travel Club to access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
Speaker: In the spirit of sharing, I have added a link with a built-in discount to the description so that you can become a member of the Ultimate Travel Club and travel at trade prices.
Speaker: Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds and say, hello, Kira. Thank you for having me Michael. That's a very generous introduction.
Speaker: Oh, i so I did my research, mate. I did my research. And you've certainly achieved an awful lot for someone who qualifies for Forbes 30 under 30 list.
Speaker: Well, thank you for having me. I'm flattered to be here. and it means a lot to be welcomed on your show. Thank you. Could we please start with you just elaborating a little bit on the or the sorts of organizations that you have founded and built?
Speaker: Absolutely. The underlying force of my life that sort of brought me to what I'm doing now especially is this sort of growing up across conflict. All conflict is ultimately information conflict, or at least it has its roots in information conflict.
Speaker: And as you mentioned, I was born and raised in Kiev, ah in Ukraine. i sort of came of age in Israel, in Aviv. and tel aviv And then came the United States, initially spent time on the East Coast, then in the Midwest, and then in California to kind of sell all the major kind polarities of the United States.
Speaker: In that journey, having had the chance to delve into finance, into technology, into many different other sectors, the problem that kept haunting me and the problem that I felt most devoted to, and I still, you obviously to this day, is this idea of how can we,
Speaker: very much in the spirit of of the show, help people think, help people make up their own mind without forcing them to pick a side, whether that be political or economic or social or cultural, without really forcing them to agree or disagree, triggering them into outreach or some sort of like, hell yeah, that's my team.
Speaker: But actually equipping them with kind of an informational knowledge base. so that they can make up their own mind without being influenced in the process. And that's very much the spirit of what i'm building today.
Speaker: form You talk about conflict and Ukraine, Israel, they're all places where technology entrepreneurs are based as well. Conflict and the technology seem coexist quite happily in some ways, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah, technology is a savior of a lot of problems, but I think it arises when there are problems to be solved. I think technology and the industry itself has a lot of entrepreneurialism in it, perhaps even more so than other industries.
Speaker: And so to me, I've always thought of to technology space unlinkable from sort of like the entrepreneurial drive. To me, they've always been very, very hand in hand. And I think both that drive and technology rise when there are ample problems to be solved.
Speaker: And in environments where I grew up, all of which are, you know, also very technology forward cultures and societies, there have been no shortage of problems to solve.
Speaker: I definitely come from that ah spirit and from that state of mind. Yes, and creating real world useful technology. I have to say thank you very much for your comments about the independent minds and um approach to not telling people what to think, but giving them enough information so that they can actually create their own opinion about a particular issue.
Speaker: The slogan doesn't come from us, it came from early audience members who told us that they were used to being told what to think or what to do by the podcast they were listening to but when they listened to the independent minds they didn't feel as if they'd been told what to think but they did know that the content had made them think it's almost as if we consume information as if it's um fast food, it's always the same. we get the same message again and again and again because it's controlled by the media, it's controlled by politicians and we get their view of the world rather than enough information to create our own view of the world.
Speaker: A hundred percent and I think that doesn't get talked about enough. This idea that not everybody has an opportunity to go to university. and develop their own critical thinking kind of skills around reading and writing and digesting information, which I think ultimately what a lot of university educations give you.
Speaker: Not everybody has the chance to afford, you know, fancy information subscriptions, right, that will distill things and in all kinds of ways that will ah inform you the everyday person, and we see this on the US side, know, primarily, but I think this resonates with the UK as well, is the everyday person is generally very robbed of sort of factual insight.
Speaker: They are left with not news, but news commentary. You can walk into any bar, you can pick up a paper, or if you're online, you don't really get the facts.
Speaker: The everyday person doesn't really have access to that. That's expensive. And that's quite fancy. What you wind up with is news commentary, is some pundit telling you what their reaction to the news is, right? Or suggesting what is the correct reaction to a certain event.
Speaker: And I think that's really tragic because that decay society. I think that causes radicalization and polarization that then obviously have so many more trickle down effects.
Speaker: So that's very much the problem that we're paying attention to and responding to it with with our work today. Yes, there has been a rise in recent years in opinion-based news.
Speaker: So in the UK, we've had the rise of a couple of news channels which have news in their titles. They're called news channels, but they are the news from a particular angle.
Speaker: And there has been the debate as to whether they are channels. news channels or opinion channels, the presenters, instead of just telling us what has happened, give us their opinion. The guests give us their opinion.
Speaker: And you can see the if the opinion of a guest doesn't match with the hosts and the channels, then the the expression that comes to mind is like, it's all our attack on that person because of their opinion.
Speaker: rather than trying to get all of the opinions on the table to then enable people to form their own opinion. That, for me, is a great sadness in many ways.
Speaker: We have lots of information. We live in a very, very connected world. But the information that we have very often comes through a filter where someone has decided to present that information in a way that they want us to have a particular reaction to that information.
Speaker: Absolutely. On top of that, obviously we all know what clickbait is, but I would say there is this emergence of outrage bait where there isn't even the drive to get a person to click and get a person to engage, but there's actually a drive on behalf of the publisher to make the person outraged, whether that's in disagreement or in agreement with the commentator, but outreach over the other side that's being framed as the enemy. I mean, I think historically, like humans have been easily controlled when they're in fear.
Speaker: To this day, at least in our cultures, Western cultures, we live in such a as safety sometimes. It's When you look at the news and just just read everything that's on in terms of the headlines, you'll see that there is an attempt at sort of either getting you to be angry, outraged, or getting you to be scared.
Speaker: And that is just continuing to this day, which is sort of, you know, I thought we were over that. it turns out it's a it's still around that practice. We've identified what the problem is and what the challenge is.
Speaker: How does informed.now address that challenge? How does it create the solution? We really think of our mission as, mean, it's kind of multiple ways. You know, obviously one way to say it is we remove the noise from the news.
Speaker: But when you dig down into what is noise, what do we consider to be noise? It's actually a whole package of things. We're not just changing one thing about the news. We're looking to fully reshape the news reading habit.
Speaker: And it's worth kind of diving into what is the news reading habit today? Today, most folks don't read the news because it's paralyzing. Like it's very, very overwhelming. It causes paralysis um because it's extremely biased and people can see through that and they're like, why?
Speaker: Am I reading this creative writing masked as reporting? And obviously a third is it's extremely, you know, it's it's pregnant with solicitation. It's absolutely full of it.
Speaker: You can't hide from another pop-up, another paywall showing up ads in the left side, ads in the right side, ads in the middle of a paragraph, ads in the middle of a sentence.
Speaker: Those three kind of horsemen of the apocalypse, right? they create an experience that turns people off from reading news, which is extremely self-disenfranchising because once you lose tabs on what's going on, you don't really have a way to influence it or or even just be in touch with what's going on.
Speaker: And so the current news reading habit is the act of seething through endless scroll, endless feed, endless bombardment that is filled with sensationalism, verbosity, solicitation, and just pure overwhelm.
Speaker: In the building of Informed, we thought about how can we do better across each of these ah dimensions? And so the the habit that we've introduced is trying to make news much more accessible and digestible so that it can become part of a daily pulse check and daily check-in.
Speaker: The way it looks like, you know, very literally to our reader is the news come to you instead of you having to go and seek them out, they come to you via SMS, via text, so that it is so immediately accessible and in front of you that You don't have to go far. You don't have to click around. You don't have to pay for annual subscriptions or paywalls or cross-checking things.
Speaker: They come to you. And the second thing that I think is sort of a lost art is that they are curated based on significance. No, we do not create your own echo chamber.
Speaker: No, we do not pick things that are going to engage you and that are going to outrage you. Our only filter is significance. Meaning, how much is this development changing the world today?
Speaker: And if it doesn't change the world, you're not going to hear about it from us. There'll be plenty other places where you can get outrage baited. So we focus on significance. So you're not covering then the news that would be an organization has launched a new product.
Speaker: It's the the news that has changed the world. That's right. Or has the potential to change the world. That's exactly right. We focus on this utilitarian model of how many people are affected by how much, right? And so if there's a local accident somewhere in, let's say in Croatia, and there's a big bus crash and 20 people lose their lives, it's a terrible thing.
Speaker: But is that going to change the world more than the reciprocal tariff action between the UK and the US or an arms deal between Ukraine and Germany.
Speaker: That is going to change so many more lives and so many more trajectories that we always prioritize the the most kind of life-changing, world-changing phenomenon. That's the curation model that we use.
Speaker: If you think about television news or internet-based news, the picture of the crash is likely to be higher up the running order than the news about a defense deal because of the graphic image that can go with the story. Absolutely.
Speaker: it's It's sort of like almost like a well-known phenomenon this point where news aren't really looking to inform you anymore. They're looking to influence you, to engage you,
Speaker: inadvertently perhaps to overwhelm you, but we're looking with this very pure mission of we actually just want to inform you. Being informed isn't just about knowing everything. You're not going to be more informed if you read every article you know, in in circulation today.
Speaker: You become informed by reading the right things, the things that are going to make a difference in terms of your decision making, what decisions you're going to make to day, or your awareness of the world or the environment that you inhabit.
Speaker: Our readers are quite busy. If they have ah limited amount of time, you know before getting out of a cab and going up the elevator to a boardroom, or before finishing making a meal for the children and running out to to to do more chores, if they have that limited window of time, they don't have the time to look at all these pictures of a crash, to hear all these political commentators jab at each other.
Speaker: They have a few moments just capture what matters. And that's where we come in to to give them that you know new personal newswire, so to speak, So the commentator in the newspaper on the internet receives information about a particular event and then comments on it and positions it in a way which complements, supports the message that they want to communicate.
Speaker: What you are doing with informed.now is taking that news feed without the commentary, without the influence and presenting it to the reader.
Speaker: So the reader can then form their own opinion based upon what they have seen on informed.now because it's news without comment.
Speaker: How do you make sure that the news that you are receiving is comment free, is authentic, is almost like first witness type news. Absolutely. I love that you mentioned that. And love how you described the sort of structure. think you said it better than I did, which essentially bringing the newswire to the everyday person, which is not really accessible, right? Because the everyday person gets the filtered version of the news in a sense of filtered through another person's perspective or media company's perspective.
Speaker: Right. Which inevitably has an agenda. But before it gets commented, read out and reinterpreted, there is this like reporting layer fact base that and news companies actually all use and have access to.
Speaker: we are bringing the power of those facts to the everyday person, right? Removing all these layers that have been mounted in between the facts and the person, we're actually bringing that sort of direct bridge between our reader and the facts. So I think that was put really well. Thank you. Michael, and appreciate you saying that. Thank you very much.
Speaker: But how do you guarantee or how do you ins ensure that that information is authentic first person? Yeah, yeah, yeah. going to tackle your question. i Thank you. I think it's a really important one.
Speaker: There's sort of know maybe two or three points. One is we have you know an unbelievable loyalty to the primary source. where you know if you read the everyday news, they're going to talk about a phenomenon, but they're not going to give you the primary source.
Speaker: For example, Trump makes a certain decision, right? It's shaking the world once again. The news article isn't actually going to give you the original announcement.
Speaker: Or if the UN made a decision, for example, to reimpose sanctions on Iran, the The news article is not going to give you the primary source. We, on the other hand, are so loyal to the primary sources.
Speaker: That's what we read. we We think of our work as research, not as journalism and not even as reporting. We think of our work as research. We have direct connections and plugs technologically and and personally to primary sources that feed the news to the world.
Speaker: What does that mean? That's the White House. That's the Chamber of Commerce. That's the UK government, right? That's the parliament. That's a Congress. That's the Central Bank of Europe, the United Nations.
Speaker: It's the original source that shares, that breaks the news initially. So we have a ah very close relationship to to these sources. I would say two thirds of the time, if not more, when our reader is reading the news, it's coming directly from a primary source research.
Speaker: where it isn't going through any layers of interpretation. We even cite the primary source in our work so that when a reader wants to learn a little bit more, we don't take them to another commentator.
Speaker: We don't even give them our own commentary. We don't really do that. We take them straight to the primary source, to the horse's mouth. So that's maybe one point that I think is very important to stress because it's so obvious and yet you cannot reasonably access this through any of the current media landscape solutions.
Speaker: So number two is aggregation of reporting. in In our process, which is half tech, half talent, we read all the news of the world we leverage a lot of technology that is proprietary and in-house and purpose-built to our use case to read all the news of the world.
Speaker: So when, for example, there's an announcement by Parliament, we are not just reading ah single source or a few sources. We actually read all the sources that are available on the web to determine what is the common fact base that that is being referenced.
Speaker: What is the commonly agreed upon set of truths that precede the commentary of each publication. And so from there, we take sort of the aggregate reporting when when we have an absence of a primary source, we take the aggregate reporting of what is commonly agreed upon and what happens to be sort of the the common fact base.
Speaker: And we leverage that in the absence of a primary source to feel confident in our insights, feel confident in the fact base that we share. We are able to do that at a scale that human company, that is all human, a traditional legacy media company could never do, because it's a human rights violation to have someone read 10,000 articles an hour.
Speaker: It would be, definitely. But you're using the technology that to be able to analyze all of the different news sources to develop ah broader picture of what is actually happening. That's right.
Speaker: And so we we take the reporting insight. In the absence of a primary source, our source becomes the primary reporter. on the issue, on the topic. But we don't just take it from a single source or a single reporter.
Speaker: We take it from the entire base of reporters that exist. And so the aggregation of reporting inside is part of what makes it ah significantly more credible.
Speaker: and Sounds brilliant brilliant. And I would say there's an important piece that is sort of like combining the best of both worlds here, which is You know, we are you know both a technology company and a human company.
Speaker: we don't so We don't really wear either one hat and say, OK, we're all AI and we're all just a tech company. No, we're not that. We're also not all human in a sense of we gather the best of both worlds into a single solution. We sort of hand off a lot of the lot of the grunt work of our research to technology, to enhance, to expand our capacity to do research, to expand our visibility into the world of information that exists on any sort of 24-hour cycle.
Speaker: But then there is still the human review, human in the loop, as we call it, approach where nothing goes out ah fully automated.
Speaker: And that's really important to us. Nothing goes out without the review, supervision and quality assessment sort of an editorial of the human team. And so that allows us to take responsibility because technology on its own ah it's not is not sort of a play at your own risk model.
Speaker: Right. using perplexity or chat GPT or anthropic, you can't actually trust without double checking or triple checking the output of those models. And so in our case, we maintain the expanded capacity of technology and an AI company with the retained credibility of a media company that you can trust.
Speaker: And every time that we send something out there, we take full responsibility for it every single day. So there's never something that's out there that we can't feel accountable for.
Speaker: which is important in news information. You mentioned AI there, and I'm thinking, you know, what does the future look like for informed.now and news information? what's What's the future going to be like?
Speaker: Yeah, I appreciate that question. We have been doing really well in our our flagship product slash service, which is world news.
Speaker: It's what we call global priorities. And we have a mix of technology and talent that enables us to take that further into new realms across industries and across locales, you know, tune our approach and our mix of tech and talent to where it's okay, well, we've we've got a great product out in the market that's making folks feel like global citizens.
Speaker: Now, what if we created a solution, for example, for the local market, right? What are the news in London today? What are the news in Belgium and hyper localize our approach?
Speaker: Another direction that we're also very interested in, and we have private pilots in the making is custom approaches for businesses. So if business thrives on information asymmetry, right, whether it's a consulting business, a thought leadership business of some sort, there is a huge alpha to be gained through information asymmetry.
Speaker: And so can we offer them a way to know things first and be the first to know in their industry, whether that's real estate or health care materials or industrials?
Speaker: We have the capacity to tune our work towards their kind of end. And I think that's the direction that we're very excited to go into ah in the quarters ahead. Yeah, sounds very exciting.
Speaker: I wish you well with it all, and I look forward to ah to watching how it all grows. But for today, Kira, it has been fascinating to just explore this issue of misinformation overload and ah very practical real-world solution to that. I really do appreciate your time today. Thank you very much.
Speaker: Michael, thank you for having me. Thank you for welcoming me. It's been delightful. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Kira Shiskin, the founder of informed.now.
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