Clean Your F*cking House B*tch
Our minds are like houses. When they're new, they're empty. As we live our lives we acquire treasures that eventually turn into shit that creates clutter. Some of this stuff is useful, while some of it is simply junk which just creates obstacles for us. What if we could eliminate the nonsense we don't need, and create more room for useful things? Join us on this podcast where we discuss removing what we don't need, implementing beneficial changes to our minds, bodies and souls, to create a life of abundance and fulfillment.
Clean Your F*cking House B*tch
Ep. 109 - How Kira Shishkin is Changing the Way We Get Our News
What if you could stay informed without doom-scrolling, bias, or overwhelm? In this episode, we sit down with Kira Shishkin, CEO of informed, a “news concierge” that delivers concise, factual updates via SMS—helping you cut through the noise and reclaim your attention.
Kira shares how growing up across Ukraine, Israel, and the U.S. gave him a unique perspective on how information can be weaponized—and why he’s committed to building a service that strips news down to just the facts. Each morning, informed subscribers receive a 30-second briefing distilled from thousands of sources, free of spin, sensationalism, or hidden agendas.
We dive into:
- Why traditional media feeds anxiety (and how informed flips the script)
- How brevity and neutrality can actually deepen your understanding
- The surprising mental health benefits of a “cleaner” information diet
- Why SMS—not apps or feeds—remains the most intentional channel for news
Whether you want to stay sharp for conversations, reduce information stress, or simply make sense of the world without all the noise, this conversation with Kira will change the way you think about news.
👉 Try informed at https://informed.now
👉 Connect with Kira Shishkin: l.informed.now/kira
Hello and welcome to Clean your Fucking House Bitch with Nancy, Kevin and Lou. In our program we get real about the challenges of life and living. Your mind is the most powerful tool you have to ensure you are on your desired path for success and satisfaction. Yet from the day you are born, you gradually and subconsciously fill it with tons of useless shit that gets in your way. Why is that? How can you clean that mess up? We'll show you how. Get ready to clean your fucking house. Hello everyone, Welcome back to another episode of Clean your Fucking House Bitch. We have a guest with us today, Very exciting guest, and I am not going to steal his thunder or do any kind of long introduction, because you know what that's all for him. Kira, please introduce yourself. Tell us what you're about, tell us what your company's about and why you are here today.
Speaker 2:Luis Kevin, Nancy, thank you so much for for having me on. It's such a pleasure to be here. I'm Kira Shishkin, the CEO and founder of Informed, which is the news concierge for the everyday person, and build the solution to help people navigate a very loud and a very polluted information world which we live in, and I'd love to dive in talk more about the importance of reclaiming your attention and all the things concerning housecleaning and mental housecleaning that I think will resonate with.
Speaker 3:For sure. I mean, the biggest question is how do you navigate? I mean, the biggest question is how do you navigate? But before we get there, what brought you to wanting to provide this kind of a service? How did you get here?
Speaker 2:Totally, and I think there are sort of maybe two stories One is the more personal and one is the more just looking at the market, looking at the world we live in and recognizing that this is not something I want to subscribe to, it's not something that I want to sort of affirm with my choices, and so, maybe touching briefly on the personal side, I grew up in what I could describe as information conflict.
Speaker 2:I was born and raised in Ukraine, in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and I actually came of age in Israel and spent almost a decade there before coming to the United States and Ukraine the multipolar conflict in Israel, and then the civil war type conflict of information warfare in America, and, as I just, you know, saw all those things unfold and realizing like, wow, you really can't trust anything, you can't take it for granted, you really can't trust anything.
Speaker 2:You can't take it for granted and you want to have a real discipline to what you consume, how you consume it, what you allow to influence you, and I think that's part of the personal kind of seeing the market, seeing the opportunity is. News has been broken for so long that it's almost like most people can't even remember when news were informative without being influential, informative without being overwhelming, informative without being soliciting. Right now we don't have those news anymore. News is very broken and there was just a real need that I saw to try to do something about it because it was frustrating to me and kind of people I care about and, as we tested and saw, this was actually very you know, resonance idea across a lot of people. That's how informed I was born so your website, believe, is informednow.
Speaker 1:Is that correct? Exactly, tell us how it works. How exactly does informed work?
Speaker 2:Totally. The website that we have is, you know, purposely very minimalist and has very little on purpose. It sort of speaks to our entire brand of. We are not here to add noise to your information diet, we are here to remove it as much as possible. And so that's sort of the comment on our website, which is very, very simple and just tells you exactly what we do and stops short of taking any more of your time. But the way our actual business works is we don't operate through the website. The website is just a, an entryway, a welcoming, a welcome doormat for the work that we do, and our entire uh company and mission runs through sms, which is the last channel where people still pay attention and where people still have a level of intention.
Speaker 2:I think that has been lost from a lot of other channels. People don't read email anymore. People also don't really want to send email anymore. It's been a very loud, a very polluted space for a really long time. People don't really want to send email anymore. It's been a very loud, a very polluted space for a really long time. People don't really want to be on websites. There's too many websites. There's too many tabs open. There's too many computers. It's barely breathing. Most of them are.
Speaker 2:Most of the folks are on their phones, but they're also scrolling. Nobody really wants to be scrolling, people just are and they're sucked into it. Nobody really wants to be scrolling, people just are and they're sucked into it. But the SMS world is so absolutely privacy users, except for the things that they wish to share with us. Now, that's a huge difference between SMS and any sort of channel you've ever heard of online.
Speaker 2:The other element I would say is also the simplicity of it. You cannot have rich, long videos. A lot of media. You have really really bite-sized, small content. Especially our texts are 30 seconds or less, always. A lot of media. You have really really, you know, bite-sized, small content. Especially, you know, our texts are 30 seconds or less always, and it creates a sense of minimalism and precision that we aspire towards and we picked the channel. But the channel also picked us in many ways, and so Informed is a news concierge that operates through SMS and sends you executive news briefings that give you the ability of being informed without being influenced, and that's the core of what we do.
Speaker 3:I'm always about simplicity, right, like, bring it the way any way we can find calm and kind of let the shoulders drop down and breathe while we're gathering information is better. But how do you then also maintain some level of context and integrity with all of the news, like when you start funneling it down? How, how do we keep it real?
Speaker 2:Totally, totally. There's also multiple answers to that question. I think maybe the shortest one is we prioritize news based on a certain framework. It's a framework that we've created. It's how we see the world. It's a filter based on significance, and significance is essentially how does this shape the world? And that obviously follows a utilitarian model of how many people are affected to how much of an extent. So if there is a bus crash in Pakistan, that's a terrible thing and we're not happy about it, but that's a much smaller item than the EU and the United States just signed a tariff agreement. It's going to trickle down and impact every household, every family that consumes a raw material, a metal or a semiconductor material. You know a metal or a? You know a semiconductor? Things that are going to really shape the way people live, whether they immediately can acknowledge that because right away you see, oh, this is really consequential, or things that they need to be aware of. But they don't necessarily see right away that a tariff is going to lead to a change in price. It's going to lead to certain other kind of trickle down effects.
Speaker 2:And so we focus on those most important news and we cover the entirety of the world. So every day we scour hundreds and thousands of articles per topic. We don't just read a single article or we don't just look at a single source. We essentially look at the entirety of the web, which is home to the world's information, and we see what is going on. How can we extrapolate to verify this information? How can we fact check it? How can we make sure that things that we showcase are 100% accurate?
Speaker 2:We take full responsibility for our content. We don't publish things that we don't a hundred percent can put our reputation behind um and we conduct that research on an ongoing, daily basis to give our reader the ultimate view. That takes 30 seconds. That gives you the, the facts, just the facts. No commentary um, what, what happened? Where did it happen, when and what are the implications or context that we can sort of triage from that but or triangulate from that, but we stop short of any sort of commentary, analysis, opinion. There are worse sources for that and we don't play in that domain.
Speaker 4:Fair enough, I'm trying to. I'm obviously absorbing everything through my lens and I kind of think about things a little bit weird if you've listened to episodes. So is this? This is about removing influence, right? So is this? This is about removing influence, right?
Speaker 4:So when I think about the news, I think about propaganda and a lot of bullshit that comes across and throughout different points in recent years, previous years what you see on certain social media pages is so much different than what's on mainstream news channels, right? But then it seems like it gets to a point where people that speak about truth get shadow banned. It's hard to find real information, Like I never know what to trust, right? So you mentioned truth, you mentioned removing influence, you mentioned algorithms to verify and validate information. Like you're really trying to just bring truth to people without any type of influence and allowing people to absorb with their own perception what's going on in the world. Or is there like, is that basically it? Or is there a larger, a larger plan in action? And I guess, like, how, if you are providing truth to people, like, are you concerned with there not being a level of control over your business and network?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you've raised so many important topics for us to cover. I think there are so many ways that we are trying to help folks. You know we are trying to safeguard attention. We're trying to help people save money If they're interested in news. It's expensive to keep in touch with everything Washington Post, new York Times, the information, financial Times. You add all those things and they become unbearable, right? The subscription to Financial Times is $1,000 a year. By the way, it is not cheap.
Speaker 2:And if you want to have multiple sources because you don't want to just read the New York Times, drink from that soup, because you don't want to just read the New York Times and drink from that soup, or you don't want to just read the Washington Post and drink from that kind of pond you wind up having to get multiple sources and in the end of the day, you wind up having to read a lot more just to figure out where you stand. And every place is going to force. You demand that you pick a side. Here's what we think, here's our perspective. Place is going to, you know, force. You demand that you pick a side. Here's what we think, here's our perspective, here's our bias, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, but there's sort of like we see this as two categories of people. One is so resigned from reading news because it's been so toxic, so overwhelming and so like inaccessible that they've just quit. They're like I don't want to keep in touch with what's going on. I'll hear it from my friends if it's important enough, which we call like, secondhand news, which is most of the time third or fourth hand news. So that's one type of character.
Speaker 2:The other character, let's call him Luis. Luis is a geek of news and he loves all things. You know all things world, us. Just he wants to be in touch with the world. Maybe he has to because he is an investor, for example, or a manager. He needs to make decisions that are not in isolation of reality. For Luis to keep in touch with the world is going to cost a few thousand dollars a year just to cross-reference, just to read and figure out what's actually going on. And even if we forget about the money, the amount of time it's going to take for Luis to figure out what he thinks about a topic is going to have to be reading one side, reading the other side, figuring out where you stand.
Speaker 2:You're at least reading double, if not triple the content you actually should be reading, and so it's exhausting for one type of person who's really invested and interested and it's basically generally just inaccessible to the person that's already been sort of disillusioned with news. We help both of those people in the same way, which is we make news factual news much more accessible and affordable. Of course, I mean we literally cost a few dollars and that's on purpose. We want to be an accessible solution and we give people the ability to make up their own mind. That's, I think, ultimately. The bottom line is both the Kevin who's resigned from news let's just call him Kevin. He doesn't have to be Kevin. Kevin who's resigned from news let's just call him Kevin. He doesn't have to be Kevin Kevin who's resigned from news.
Speaker 4:He's going to be Kevin, for sure.
Speaker 2:Kevin and Luis is just nonstop reading, nonstop, every day, every hour. You know Luis is exhausted, kevin is uninformed and vulnerable to misinformation. We want to give both of those guys the ability to make up their own mind, information. We want to give both of those guys the ability to make up their own mind, give them the building blocks of their opinion, without you know, suggesting a perspective. So I'll pause here, but I can go into.
Speaker 1:So much more depth wherever is interesting.
Speaker 1:I'd actually like to ask you something that would be of how it would be viewed through your business, through informed, and what I mean by that is an example, because what Kevin shared is so true in terms of the fact that there's and this is something we just had on a prior episode signal versus noise, static, sorry, signal versus static a lot of static out there and sadly, unfortunately, however you want to look at it, it seems like the static is getting more and the signal is getting drowned. Now, two things. One, I guess there's a bit of how do you sift out the static, whether algorithmically or through human review of things, which seems impossible if you're sifting through thousands and thousands and thousands of articles. But the other part of that is you use the phrase factual news. I would venture to say that probably 99% of what we read is more of an opinion versus factual news. So then do you not even have, say, topics that are more of an opinion nature? Or maybe, getting back to my original request, I'm sorry for the very long question here, but about an example Meaning, let's use one Vaccines.
Speaker 1:One article could be vaccines save lives and of course, as you mentioned, the propaganda mainstream might have their own commentary and opinion on that. Another side will be like vaccines cause autism or vaccines are bad and they're going to kill you, whatever. Would you even put a story about vaccines on your platform, or if you would give us an example of how that would be phrased so that it comes across more factual and less commentary?
Speaker 4:Before you answer, I just want to point out last episode, lou. We started with math politics and now we're getting into vaccine conversation. We're going to lose every listener we have.
Speaker 1:We also have religion. We also threw religion in there.
Speaker 2:So we're almost done with all the topics.
Speaker 1:Oh, and flat earth too, Don't forget.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, I feel like there's multiple questions and they're both so good and so important and I so appreciate you asking them. Maybe to tackle the—I don't know which one to tackle first. I'll talk a bit about our process. Maybe it will sort of answer both or none, and that is. You know, the way we go through it and I think I was part of the spirit of Kevin's question as well is like how we go through.
Speaker 2:The noise that exists out there is we read an exorbitant amount of information. If we were to really simplify, like, what do we do for people? We read all the news so that you don't have to, because you don't have the option, you don't have the time, you don't have the money and you don't have the attention to read a thousand articles a day. And neither should you, because you should spend time with your children, you should spend time with your partner, or you should go do what you're what you're meant to do or you want like to do. News readership all day is not most people's calling. So the way we do that is a combination of both technology aspects and we leverage AI. You know we are essentially an AI company as well, but we also leverage humans in a way that is important and is not replaceable. We don't have an AI obsession, or even a technological obsession where we want to say, okay, we can just do this all with robots, we don't need any humans. But we have to allocate the right tasks to the right part of our team, and so some of the grunt work, the labor that is not really good for humans, because humans make mistakes, they get tired and it would be a human rights violation to ask someone to read a thousand articles a day it would be right and so we have a lot of the components of our work automated in ways that allow for the broad-reaching research topic stacking, understanding who is talking about what and what speed and what sort of sentiment.
Speaker 2:We have a lot of those things automated, but the ultimate judgment and review is what adds the accountability of us being able to say we stand behind this text every single day, right, every single day, when we talk to our readers, we take full responsibility for the entirety of the content. This is a huge difference from using, like a chat, gpt or perplexity, where they sort of give you is like, hey, we're gonna do our best at answering your question, but it's used at your own risk, right. You can't really know if perplexity or chat GPT is going to hallucinate, and 80% of the time when we use related questions they do provide an accuracy. This is a benchmarking study from a few months ago where they tested every single model on news related questions and they found that 80% of the time they are inaccurate and 50% of the time they are made up. So that's not a level of fidelity that we are comfortable with and so we give the grunt work to technology but we leave a lot of the judgment. That is still very systematic, like we do have protocols, processes.
Speaker 2:It's not just a you know, it's not just Nancy judgment. We didn't say hey, nancy, you're in charge, you tell us what we include here. It is not so editorial. In that way there's always a human element of review. That happens every single time. That is easier because they would have news company wouldn't be able to access, but also the full credibility that a technological company would not be able to claim, because they are all used at their own risk. We are not used at their own risk. We take full reputational kind of, so to speak. We put our whole reputational weight with what we do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I have three questions connected to all that, but they go together. Who's your client right? Who are the people, companies, organizations, whatever who are using this tool that you provide, and what do they say that they like best about it and what do they wish you could also do?
Speaker 2:I like that Many more questions to come, but I feel like I missed Louise's question about, and I wonder if we should address it now or later but.
Speaker 2:I was going to mention, like, what does it look like to have no bias? Because I feel like that's the question on everyone's mind right now is, like when Kevin hinted at this, luis mentioned this and I will get to your question as well, nancy. 100%, I feel like this has been just on everyone's mind. The elephant in the room is what do news without bias look like, when all the news that we've ever seen has opinion, and I actually want to maybe even flash to you one of our to like, maybe even flash to you, um, like one of our texts, maybe even from the, the website, and kind of talk over why we think that's the way to communicate, um, so maybe I can share my screen, if, if, that's a good idea, yep, yeah, and.
Speaker 1:And please also read while you're sharing, so that our listeners can follow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds great. I think the settings are disabled for sharing, but that's okay.
Speaker 3:Oh, I think you have to be a co-host, kev.
Speaker 4:Here, hold on, let me see Kevin's a control freak. No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2:Well, I was actually just going to share our website.
Speaker 2:Go ahead and try now, kara, you want yeah, because anyone, any one of you, could also do that. Okay, here we go. So I will preface by saying one thing is when you know all this exists in the context of america we serve, uh, nationwide, that's kind of a whole. You know, mission and purpose is to we focus on the American person, not on anyone, because people would value different things all around the world. We focus on the world news, but from an American perspective, not in the sense of what does American think about it. But does it impact the American? Does it not? So it's not about the American perspective, it's about the American. The american like. Does it trickle down to affect my life in wisconsin or my life in california? That's kind of the filter that we put on things.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I've mentioned that's sort of important is when the news in america is not news, it's news commentary. When we think of what like news is, it's not news at all, it's news commentaries, people talking about news to you, and that's not the same thing. And so what we like to call news is really what people think called reporting, and so reporting is the true kind of fundamental name of the news that we think are newsworthy and what we think is serious and that stops short of saying, hey, vaccines are going to save lives or vaccines are going to ruin lives, it just says, hey, this many people get vaccinated, this is different from last year and it's a historical low in these regions. That doesn't have any opinion to it. It has the reporting like ground facts. You know ground truth, perhaps to like what's actually going on and you make up your own mind. And maybe Nancy looks at this and says, okay, well, looks like vaccines are saving lives. And Louise looks at it like, well, thank God, I hate vaccines, less vaccines. This is excellent. And so what does this look like in practice? Right, because we do report on a lot of topics that I think people would find extremely polarizing. So I'll skip some of this part because I think you'll see that. But we are so, so kind of minimalist and pure and that's very purposeful.
Speaker 2:Here is what our text looks like right. Looks like right is. Every morning, um, we send you an executive news briefing and it's not always in five points. It can vary, I would say, from four to eight. It depends on kind of what made the filter, and it talks about things that just like, really matter. Um, to you know what would change your life, what would shape your existence.
Speaker 2:And so let's pick a really controversial one. I'm not sure if this one had any super controversial ones, but how about this one? Right? Number five Republican, texas governor Abbott signs bill mandating 10 commandments to be displayed in classrooms and voluntary daily prayer across public schools. Same day federal appeals court rules a similar law a quote, plainly unconstitutional quote in Louisiana, right?
Speaker 2:And so it doesn't really tell you what we think about this, because we don't have an opinion. That's our whole values. We don't have an opinion, and it doesn't tell you what to think either. It just tells you what exactly happened. And then you know, maybe even across the Zoom call, we may have different opinions and interpretations to this. The benefit is we now have a common fact base as to what we're talking about. Right, we't agree on what they disagree on. The level of schism in a common fact base is so polarized now that we don't even know what we're disagreeing on when we argue sometimes, and so we're hoping at least to bridge that. And so, as you look at this, I'm curious what are your reactions? Does this have a stint to it? Should it? And is this news? Maybe it's not even news to you. You look at this. I'm curious. You know what are your reactions. Does this have a stint to it? Should it? And, uh, you know, is this news?
Speaker 4:maybe it's not even news to you I was going to actually ask, not directly commenting on this but are there algorithms that dictate who receives what news? Because people are going to have different interests, so how do you decipher, if you?
Speaker 3:sign up. Do the three of us get the same five or eight bullets, or when?
Speaker 1:we sign up, do we select preferences or something like that.
Speaker 2:So there's a mix of both. Some of the things we are expanding into, probably next year, some of the things are already live. So one is a conversation and so, while you may get the same text, if Luis is interested in number four but Nancy's interested in number five, you can just text and say hey, can I learn more about this, or can I get another source for number four? Like, I want to hear about a certain element of this, or can you give me more context or more background? That is something we personalize to you and what you would care about. The other element is like can you pick your preferences Right now? No, we are pioneering this sort of flagship product which is kind of a global citizen approach, like just the things that affect every single person.
Speaker 2:In the coming months and definitely year, we're unfolding more and more on custom topics. You can say well, actually, I'm obsessed with technology, I'm obsessed with healthcare, I'm obsessed with the Supreme Court I don't know a lot of people who are and then you have much more tailored content to you. Right now we are still kind of pioneering this most important one, because we need to get people on board to just understand things that are affecting their environment and the world they inhabit. Before we start being a specialty shop, because I think there's a lot of specialty shops out there Like, if you want to learn about tech, there's a thousand newsletters. You want to learn about healthcare? There's a lot of things there. This is a little bit different. Right, you're not going to get your deep dives here. This is going to be a launchpad for you to dig in, dive deeper, and so for now, we're starting with the broad, but probably going to increasingly get more specialized as we see more demand from our users.
Speaker 4:I love the concept for sure. I think I'm curious if you have any insight into how different the news is in America to its citizens versus in other countries around the world. But also, how do you validate information? So say, a big study is done and it says that tobacco-less nicotine pouches are super detrimental to your health, worse than cigarettes. But then when you look into it, it's funded by big tobacco right and a lot of that happens. So do you? How far do you go with validating? Or is it literally like hey, this study was done here with the results and that's it, yeah.
Speaker 2:We go extremely far, in fact. We don't publish something until we have complete confidence that it's what we call it newsworthy. But when we say newsworthy we also mean credible newsworthy. We don't mean it's something that just happened, it's just something that was said. So sometimes we would actually sacrifice timeliness where something just happened and everyone's talking about it. Sometimes we would say, well, we would rather be late to talk about this, but be sure and confident that when we send it to our readers we know exactly that this is a truth. And so we actually don't report on breaking news. We definitely do timely news, like you would hear of things within a day, at most within two days, of something monumental that happened. But very often when something is breaking, no one knows anything about it and journalists are rushing to be the first person to quack on a topic, and very often that winds up being inaccurate and so they need to have an update and then another update and it turns out that was wrong. So there's a correction. Now. Everybody forgives them because obviously they're there real time 're, you know, figuring things out. Totally okay, but for the reader that doesn't have time to read news every single hour of the day, we can't afford the time to read every single update, and so sometimes we let things cook and let things brew until we know that this is ready for uh reporting, and so sometimes it slows us down. But we don't serve the news-breaking reader, the breaking news reader. We serve the intentional, thoughtful, busy reader, and so we always go through a lot of pains to validate how do we do this? More directly, answering the how of your question, kevin, is we read all the news on the topic, not just, you know, one study was published or one source said this. We read everything that was collectively kind of all the literature, so to speak, on the topic, which can be other research or it can be just other reporters on the same event, and we find and identify a common fact base of like what are they agreeing on? That seems to be a non-perspective fact and we tease those out. We obviously have our own workflows and approaches to how we do that, but we take into account every piece of literature that is credible. If someone's just reposting, obviously that's not valuable to us, and we do so internationally. So sometimes there are world events that BBC in Britain reports, as well as the AP globally, as well as perhaps Guardian in the UK, as well as perhaps South China Post. Maybe they also reported on this. We would take a look at all of them. And he decided hey, this is a Chinese paper, this is a British paper, this is an American paper, but it helps us uncover that common fact base and we limit ourselves to only sharing the common fact base and none of that color. No blue, no red. We are uncolored news.
Speaker 1:Kira, I'm curious. You mentioned something earlier about what I'm going to call the initial news briefing. So someone signs up, they get an SMS with the five points for their executive briefing. I think I heard you say hey, I'm interested on topic number three a little bit more. So there's some interactivity where you can chat back or text back and say, hey, expand on number five, Tell me more about number three and keep the dialogue going.
Speaker 2:OK, totally, totally. I don't want to lose track of Nancy's question as well. So let's you know I don't want to lose it. But to answer briefly yes, so it's conversational, right. A lot of our users they're so busy they don't have the time to chat forever, so it's not really something that they can, you know, spend the time on, and they do it very rarely.
Speaker 2:But you always can and all you have to do is chat back and say, hey, like, can I just learn more about this? And that's where we kind of break the third wall a little bit of automations. And that is always human. And so that's the big difference between, like, chatting with a chatbot and chatting with a human team of experts is there. It breaks into a human conversation, which means two things. One is you can trust it entirely or as much as you trust our reputation, our capability, and it's not the same thing as talking to Complexity or talking to ChatGPT, where it'll give you stuff but you're going to have to cross-check it, double-check it, read it again until you're actually sure that it's correct. With us, our whole value is that you don't have to do that, and if we're failing at that value, then we fail you as a customer and we lose you as a customer and we should. And so that goes into more of a research angle where sometimes a lot of our users ask like, hey, want to learn more about that.
Speaker 2:The context for the iran strikes on the us military base in qatar, like I just joined, what happened? And then we say, hey, well, here's what happened. Here's like a view over the last couple of weeks, here's a view historically, and here's links that would enable you to catch up to that. Reading, um, reporting, analysis of various kinds, the best of the best, right, because we are essentially curators of information and we look through all the stuff to find the stuff that's worth reading and worth consuming and we give it out to you. So if you want to dive deeper, you can, but you also have this additional layer of commentary from us in terms of like, here's the context and it also, you know, stops short of any sort of opinion bias and suggesting a perspective, and I think that's the gist of it. That's where it kind of gets more into the custom research element. But hopefully that answers your question and I want to jump to Nancy's because I feel bad for skipping over it, sorry, nancy.
Speaker 3:No, there's time for everything, and I think that's also like let's be real about time. That's a great place to kind of sum up the benefit, you know, coming back to that, what are the benefits and what do people like and what do they want more of really will tell us a lot about what's going well and where you guys will be expanding totally, and I think that's exactly like.
Speaker 2:Thank you for repeating that question. I think that's helpful for the listeners. It's um, it's been really inspiring and motivating to see that the core value proposition, which is like news without noise, has been resonating and not just, per your original question not just with the leaders and decision makers, which is kind of the category we initially focused on, but also the everyday person, people that aren't necessarily in like CEO positions, aren't necessarily executives and board members, none of that sort of elite. All people can benefit from this, and the common characteristic is busyness and interest in like information efficiency, like I don't have time to read forever and I need to know what's going on. It's like a combination of curiosity and a lack of time. I want to know what's going on, I don't have time to get to know it through the traditional methods, and so that's like the persona, and it's really defined by a trait or a perhaps behavior, not by a professional role, a demographic role, a profile or even age. It has nothing to do with that. We have young users, we have really old users, we have users that are subscribed to a thousand other things. We have users that are only subscribed to us, and that's actually a growing number. And we have users that are red and are blue, that are on the far right, on the far left. They're up and down wherever the spectrum brings them. They are rich and poor, because our service is so accessible that we want to be able to serve America, and so there's a broad range of people.
Speaker 2:There's a strong feedback as to like, hey, this is saving me so much time. This is the opposite of clickbait and I feel informed. I think the areas where we actually are feeling the pushes to grow faster is the thing that you brought up right away is I want to be able to personalize this even more. I want to be able to right away, tweak certain things and get the digest, get the briefing that I care about. There is an issue with that. A little bit of like, are you just creating an echo chamber for yourself? In that case, why don't you just go to social media? You already have what you're asking for. You actually already have that service. You just don't know it or maybe you don't acknowledge it.
Speaker 2:Is there some level of responsibility to say, actually, like, our filter is significant and you know, if we have filters in the future, those are filters that we will implement. There are not the filters that you set. There's also a lot of technological complexity with, like, customizing per individual person, because we also keep the human element in there as well. Right, it's like we still supervise, and supervising every single person is going to be a little bit challenging, and the challenge is just nowhere near there to be able to fully trust the technology and the AI specifically to monitor autonomously, and we won't be there for years.
Speaker 2:And I'm not talking about just our company. You know our company and our venture. I'm talking about the industry. I've been in AI for quite a few years, I feel like for definitely as long as it's been popular, and I've worked in AI strategy and within AI companies in Silicon Valley. And it's just like we are far away from reasoning AI, because all the money that we've spent so far as an economy and as the world has been going to large language models, right, and they don't reason, they just guess and we can't guess our way around facts.
Speaker 3:Wow, and that's just a detail we wouldn't have thought of, but the influence and impact of that does change how you approach it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for asking that.
Speaker 3:So let's be in touch with our users about what kind of feedback do you get where people like? How does this benefit people's everyday life, not just because they get the information faster, but what embodiment of their daily being does this change? It gives back time, it maybe reduces stress because it's eliminating some of the questions and BS, and it's giving people more ease and trust.
Speaker 4:Seems like it could potentially reduce the polarity in this country too, because, depending on what news station you're watching, like it's just either one side or the other. Right, yeah, carol, what are?
Speaker 2:your thoughts.
Speaker 4:I don't know if you answered, but and I don't know, nancy you just ask a question. But, like the news in America, because that's a heavy focus, right, Like you want to bring worldly news to Americans, so you've obviously identified an area of opportunity specifically with America, right? So what, what are you seeing that's different with the news? And I'm asking mostly for our listeners, right, because our entire last episode was about all the bullshit, all the static. So what do you see that's different in other countries versus what we get served to us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a few thoughts on that. Should I first answer Nancy's question?
Speaker 4:We don't want to circle back in an hour to Nancy again. Sorry, Nancy.
Speaker 2:No, but I'll keep both in mind. I think the embodimentancy that was gonna, you know, respond because I love that you. You mentioned that like the embodiment of the value of informed. Well, I think that's very much like why we're having this conversation. It helps people clean their fucking house and in their head.
Speaker 2:It makes a difference. It lightens their, their load, it lightens their day, it lightens their head. That's like what it does. First, right, it's because now, when you're sitting in a bar and you're watching some anchor I don't know why they put those things up in bars, but like you're watching some anchor in the background talking about things to you, you're in the workspace and your boss is saying, hey, how does this impact us? And you're like, what impact? Like what are we talking about? Or your friends are you?
Speaker 2:Like you're, you're not in a loop, you don't know what's going on. Or, if you do, you've already kind of been brainwashed by that, your social media feed, or by you know someone else talking about this. Maybe it's your family, maybe it's your partner. And you're like kind of like being just thrown around these topics and like, like, what do I think about this? Do I hate tariffs or do I love tariffs? Like, do what I don't know. You now have like the confidence of like I know exactly what I need to know and you can't, like you know, push me off my balance. Like, if you have perspective, I would love to hear it and I'd love to share mine, but I know, like the, the, the base facts behind this, and I know what happened yesterday, I know what happened today and it took me 30 seconds. It's not like I had to spend hours doing this. So I just think I have my own kind of like anchor, my own ballast, whether that's in the professional world, in your work, or with your friends or with your family. Like you just know what's going on, but you're spending none of the time, and so I think confidence is one thing that you can embody.
Speaker 2:I think people do embody greater confidence. We hear that in different words from our users. People feel confident, people feel lightness of the head, as I was mentioning in a different way. They're lightheaded in the right way, they're more confident and I think there's a sense of like independence, almost right. It's like you know, like I have my own compass and I we used to describe informed as the compass for misinformation overload or, sorry, the compass for the age of misinformation overload. That's how we used to describe inform in the early days. Then we'd like too many words. Maybe we should bring it back. That's. That's pretty much the embodiment of informs the values for, for the users.
Speaker 3:Love it. I mean, cause that's me. I'm the average user, I don't. I want to know, but I don't want to be bogged down and I want to be able to have a conversation with my friends and not feel like I don't know how to communicate about it because I don't know the facts.
Speaker 1:So Certainly not that have all that fluff in there, like I don't know if it was Kevin or you, nancy, that talked about real relief from stress and anxiety and all that which you read, certain words that are in certain news pieces, and they're triggering because they're not just pure facts yeah, so take care and it can be so implicit, like the other day I was reading the.
Speaker 2:You know I'm reading, all I do is read all day but the other day I was reading and like the implicit bias and just the word choice. Like, instead of saying, like you know, congress cancels, uh, this funding, they would say congress claws back this funding. And you're like, why did you have to say that? Like, why did you have to say those words? Because you, you're trying to relate information and this is going to turn some people off and it's going to influence other people who are not being maybe very attentive. And it's just like, why are we doing this? So, kevin, to hit your question right around, like, how is it in other countries? Because we do monitor the entirety of the world with this. It's better and worse. I think there is no AP like Associated Press. There is no. I think there is no AP like Associated Press. There is no Reuters. There is no. Like infrastructural reporters that are pretty good at keeping it clean. Like you know, associated Press has been getting some shade recently. But like, comparing to what else is out there, like there are some publications that exist in the US and are being commonly read that are probably the least biased we've seen and we walk the walk because we actually cite them. We cite if we have to cite a journalist instead of a primary source, which is more preferred for us. If we have to cite a journalist, we would always cite reporters, not you know, if we have to cite a journalist, we would always cite reporters, not open-ended, not op-ed journalists, but reporter journalists. We would always look for folks that we can trust. We don't really do Fox News. We've never done Fox News. We also don't even do CNN, which I feel like isn't as bad as Fox News on their spectrum, but is even being on the spectrum of having opinion and using charged words disqualifies journalists and a reporter from being sourced and being cited by us. We don't look at them and so, whether you're CNN or whether you're Fox News, like we don't pay attention or we pay attention but we keep you like a huge arm's length.
Speaker 2:In other countries we see this a lot Like there is more Fox News and CNN in other countries than there are Reuters, bloomberg and Associated Press, which are more like pure reporting, and so in some ways, other countries are lacking the media journalism infrastructure to actually have unbiased use. If anything, we should be building this for the entire world and we are. We're just starting with America, because America needs it right now. Yes, but there's more kind of, so to speak, like charged opinionated pieces and there's there's more. But there's more kind of, so to speak, like charged opinion pieces and there's less infrastructure.
Speaker 2:But I think the effort to to polarize people is is lower. In other countries, like here, the effort seems to be like it seems like very intentional. People are the outlets, are you know so visibly charging people one way or another? Yeah, there isn't as much infrastructure that is objective or objective attempting in other countries, but there isn't as much of the agenda as we've seen in America. Here is just so in your face. I feel like we don't hide our corruption, we don't hide our polarization here. We just put it front and center and we act as if that's okay. You know the countries, they do it, but they aren't so upfront about it. Perhaps I don't think it's as intense.
Speaker 2:Um, but if I had to pick, like, if I could pick another country's information ecosystem and and america's, I would pick americas, because there are like more infrastructural resources here that are useful, like if I was to recommend right, I, I'm not in the business of recommending anything, but, like I would say, reuters, associated press, bloomberg, bbc, are sources that do a pretty darn good job at like, not, you know, injecting bias into every single word that they, that they put out there. Um, they don't exist in other countries, right, unless, you think, world coverage. There is no version of that for Romania, there is no version of that for, uh, russia. Now, that's, that's a big one, one we should have, and so there's obviously this craziness in America. There's also these infrastructural partners that you can look to and have at least some level of trust.
Speaker 3:This is awesome. We could talk about this all night, we could just keep going. But we want to make sure that what we do is let people know, and so when we publish our episode, we'll certainly let people know how to get to your website and from there they'll know how to get um. This kind of service and and I think what you were saying is it's all people, all levels of life, whatever your nature is you don't have to be a company or a or anybody special, um, so it's really just out there for any and everybody go to your website and that that will share and they can connect and sign up yeah, yeah, I would say there's an even a better way, or there's going to website is probably the best, because you get to see it and you get to sort of ask questions about it if you, if you like, and just kind of know what you're signing in for, setting up for.
Speaker 2:But there's another way that we like to welcome users and it's part, it's part of our whole minimalism and, like, I think minimal is probably the best word for it part of a whole minimalism. Commitment is we actually operate, um, uh, what we want to say is america's next big toll-free number. You know how? There's the 800 flowers and 800 gun junk, um, so we're the opposite of that. But, uh, we have a toll-free number that is active across, uh, all of america and we actually just, um rolled it out in canada, uh, recently as well. So now we're like all of north america, north of mexico, unfortunately, um, and people can text us and if you actually get right into the ecosystem, um, just by texting our number, and so for anyone who's listening and is interested, anyone can do it. For anyone who's listening and interested, I'm like, well, I want to get informed If you want to get informed yeah, I'll mention it.
Speaker 2:Then you can just text JOIN to 844 406, INFO, which is the same as 844-406-4636. So that's our toll-free number and you text JOIN and you'll get to the right place. We'll walk you through the onboarding, which takes about five seconds, maybe six seconds if you're slow. We'll walk you through the onboarding, which takes about five seconds, maybe six seconds if you're slow, and you are part of a pure information ecosystem that doesn't seek. Our whole function is to do the opposite of what other media do, which is not influence you, not solicit you and not overwhelm you.
Speaker 1:Talk about simplicity and what a great house cleaning tool. Yeah, clean that house. Very good, kira. Any last words before we kind of wrap things up here this is an absolute pleasure and a really organic, organic conversation.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate that and thank you for having me and it's been a long time I've been getting excited about this and thank you for inviting me on and having me on. It's been really delightful. And if you want to talk again and do another house cleaning in a while, we'll be happy to and tell you about how we've been doing and how many houses we've cleaned and uh and uh, it's a pleasure to to be friends thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Well, definitely, uh. Yeah, I think that'd be great to check back in later on down the road and see how things are going. Definitely, uh, thank you very much for being on our episode. We appreciate your time, all that you do to help us clean all those dirty houses. Very nice of you to come on here again and thank you all of our listeners for joining us listening to this episode. We look forward to you joining us on our next one. Bye for now.