How the Media Manipulates You (And You Don't Notice It)

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Highlights

Nick Thompson, who wrote for his high school and college papers, points to a student loan story that used the word "legal" to make borrowers doubt the plan they're on. Kira's answer is a briefing built mostly from governments, central banks, and agencies like the WHO, paid for by readers alone. Nick reads one on air, led by Tim Cook stepping down at Apple.

Top Quotes

"If you're just counterbalancing one radical perspective with another radical perspective, you're not going to wind up in the middle. You're going to wind up exhausted, confused, disoriented, and maybe even double radicalized." (Kira Shishkin)

"Algorithms reinforce our beliefs in so many ways that we don't think we even think about. You open someone else's phone instead of your own and see a completely different reality that you can't imagine." (Nick Thompson)

"We have an abundance of information these days, and such efficient ways to distribute it, and yet we've broken the plumbing for facts." (Kira Shishkin)

"Bias disguised as news has been driving wedges in families and friendships. I can't believe how many people I know have cut off family members over a difference in political belief, and it's all because of bias infused into their news." (Nick Thompson)

Transcript

Kira Shishkin: We're talking about news, which defines how we understand and how we feel about the world that we live in, which has a direct impact on our sense of happiness, our sense of safety, our sense of well-being, and our decision-making. So it isn't just another flavor of media. It is the most consequential infrastructural understanding layer of how we live our lives.

Nick Thompson: Are you going through life blind? This is Eyes Wide Open with Nick Thompson. On this podcast, we share knowledge and stories that build human connection while elevating stigmatized societal issues such as mental health, holistic wellness, culture, free speech, and more. All to ensure we show up in the world with our eyes wide open.

Hello everyone, welcome to Eyes Wide Open. Our guest today is Kira Shishkin. Kira's a 4-time entrepreneur. He's an investor and an advisor for technology companies, and his latest endeavor is informed.now, the number one news-by-text service that helps you stay informed with facts and eliminate the toxic legacy media bias and sensationalism, and I would add propaganda. I am very grateful to have you here today to talk about the state of the news, how it's presented, and how you're looking to change that with informed.now. Welcome. How are you today?

Kira Shishkin: Nick, thank you so much for that generous introduction. I'm super happy to be here and join you for this.

Nick Thompson: Yes, me too. What I thought was interesting about your work here is you're really taking all of that out and stripping it down. So we'll get into all of that and your work and how you found this area of a market to serve. But before we do that, I always like to ask my guests: When you were a little kid, what's the first thing that you remember wanting to be when you grew up? And then how did that change a few times over the years to land you where you are today?

Kira Shishkin: I think an astronaut was very pertinent. It was very much a default answer when I was growing up, because I was growing up in a post-Soviet environment where there was still a lingering longing for the space race. There was still a lingering interest in space, although it did take a hiatus at the time. And apart from the cultural background, I was always fascinated with space. Still very much am. I've taken that passion toward water and free diving. That's a space within Earth. But that was

Nick Thompson: I've talked about the 2 things that scare me the most in life, space and the ocean. They scare me because they're endless and we don't know what's out there.

Kira Shishkin: I'm fascinated by this fun fact. This is an old one. I feel like everyone's heard of this before, but the fact that we know more about space than we know about our own oceans here on Earth is something that's always fascinated me. My interest in space hasn't gone away, but a big share of that enthusiasm has been diverted into an interest in the ocean. I spend a lot of time free diving, scuba diving, and just spending time in open water swimming when I have the opportunity. I've just always been fascinated by big, deep swaths of water.

Nick Thompson: Yeah. And to me that's part of that interest and passion about space that's resurfacing here on Earth. It literally is resurfacing, like the last couple weeks, it seems like.

Those are 2 things that terrify me. When I was younger, I was very into the planets, particularly Saturn, because of the rings. I thought the rings were cool. I'm talking like a little kid. But I'm terrified of space and the ocean. It's just like, what's down there? Why do we know more about space than we know about our own planet? It's a little scary to me, but I can see the fascination. I'm fascinated by it with my feet on the ground, we'll say that. No interest in going and exploring. Tell me how you ended up as an entrepreneur.

Kira Shishkin: Well, I feel like that story has less to do with space, or at least not yet, and more to do with my personal journey around the world, where I've come from and where I'm going. I was born and raised in Ukraine and then came of age and spent a lot of my youth in Israel before eventually coming to the United States and living on the East Coast, in the Midwest, in Chicago like yourself, and then on the West Coast. I also traveled a lot throughout those years. Going on that journey and seeing the many different problems that the world faces today, one stood out to me, and it's one of the focuses of informed.now that I'm working on today: The importance of having your facts straight, having a source of truth, and having the ability to keep up with this quickly evolving, quickly changing universe that we're part of. That's become a passion, a project, and now a goal and a mission. But I've also had a couple of adventures prior to informed.now that set me up for it well.

Nick Thompson: Well, I think what's interesting is, as an entrepreneur, you want to dig out the facts from the media, and even some of your other professional work in tech that you've done. I always try to find that yarn that goes from what you wanted to be as a kid to where you are now. That's why I asked that question. I think it's fascinating and it's a curiosity. You have a genuine curiosity and want to experience exploring that curiosity. Or at least that's my take from the little bit I've known you, especially today, that you have a genuine curiosity to find out the facts. I love that.

Kira Shishkin: I love that connecting of the dots that you put together, because I think it's very accurate. I think I've always been a very curious person. Changing environments and re-rooting into new spaces has definitely been a really big part of my life. Curiosity has kept me alive and kept me going and kept me thriving. And I think you're completely on point there with that being the common thread. I would also say I am a bit of an evangelist for curiosity as a value. I'm a bit of a proselytizer. I want to enable and encourage other people to be curious. I think inquiring minds in many ways enable a global curiosity about our world, about what's happening around us, about current life on Earth. Because that's what news is, at least what it should be. It is current life on Earth. And I think that's a great place to start being curious before we go off to space, before we go off deep into the ocean. That's a very good starting point.

Nick Thompson: And one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, in your view, what is the news? You answered that a little bit, but I'll give you an opportunity to expand on it if you want. What is the news? Because I don't think people really actually know. They say, "Oh, it's CNN. It's a newspaper." But what are they supposed to be reporting to you, right?

Kira Shishkin: I love that question. It's so simple, and it's so obviously under-answered in our society and in our culture today, because when people hear the word news, they almost get an allergic reaction to it. They're like, "Oh, news. I don't want to talk about news. We shouldn't talk about news today. No news. News, ew." And I think it's because it's been corrupted by all the news commentary that we've heard. All the news sensationalism that's thrust on us from every direction, from all the big screens in our life, from billboards to large TVs to the smallest screens we have, from our wearable devices to our iPhones. The news that we encounter in those spaces is not really news. It is news commentary. It's various kinds of interpretation and regurgitation of news by other people. It always has an agenda with it. What we've become used to as a society, as a culture, is not news. Actually, very few people have ever seen the news, I would even say. Most of us are just feeding this news commentary cycle, or I would say suffering from it. We're caught in this big trap of news commentary and news sensationalism.

So I'm answering your question through the opposite. I'm telling you what's not news, right? The news commentary, the news punditizing, the news polarization, and all the stuff that revolves around sensationalizing it, that's not news. So I just pause here: That's not news. What is news? We should get into that.

Nick Thompson: Yeah. Well, I want to add a little bit to that, too, if you don't mind. I was in college, and I took journalism in high school and was a journalist in high school and college, and I was exploring being a journalist, which I shared with you before we recorded. Well, I was taught all of these things. I was taught what is propaganda, what is sensationalism, how do you write an accurate headline, how do you decipher a news section versus the opinion section versus the feature section versus the sports section versus the entertainment section. These are all things that the journalists or reporters of the news, if they went to any kind of school, which I don't think school's the end-all be-all, would understand: In a news story, you don't put your opinion in it. Right? That's for the opinion section, and that's where you can have some debate back and forth, with one guy representing one position and another person representing another position. That's okay, but it's clearly in the opinion section.

It's been so blurred, and I think it probably always has been, but now it's become so sensationalized and so clickbaity, because everything's clicks with the internet. I mean, I have a YouTube show here. This will be on YouTube. Do you know how much time I'm going to spend trying to put together a clickbaity thumbnail just so people can hear what will be a substantive conversation? So what do you think is fueling, and I have my takes, and we'll get into what is news, but what do you think fuels all of this propaganda, and this pitting you against your neighbor, and giving you narratives instead of the actual factual reporting of what's happening around us?

Kira Shishkin: I love that you kind of answered the question for both of us. The news piece is the element of the paper that talks about the facts in a credible, reliable, referenced, clear way. And the opinion is, you know, Nick and I talking about it, sharing our thoughts on policy, sharing how things should be, analyzing it. Both flavors have the right to exist, and we need both of them these days. But it's the jumbling of them together, the arranged marriage of news with opinion, that is not welcome. I think it's doing so much more harm than good. And to a great degree, that's my personal thesis. See, I'm flagging that my opinion is the reason why we live in such a hyper-polarized culture now in the US: The news section has had this unsolicited arranged marriage with the opinion section, and it's caused all of us to have an allergic reaction to any news content, because it catches us off guard. It catches us in a moment of being triggered. Either we're in disagreement, or we're feeling fearful or angry, or we're triggered in a different way, saying, "Oh, the other people are crazy," and we are right.

Any flavor of the echo chamber, when you put the echo chamber layer onto the news, you destroy something more than just a single event of news readership. You destroy the trust. You erode the overall wanting-to-stay-informed habit, the wanting-to-keep-up-with-the-news habit. And it compounds. Over time, people are going to stop reading news. Today, news readership is at an all-time low in the age brackets that really matter, that really define our future. It's so tragic that we found ourselves in this conundrum where we have so much information these days, and such profound ways to distribute information, and yet we've broken the plumbing for facts. The average person doesn't have access to facts anymore. They only have access to the sensationalized, clickbaited, rage-baited, thumbnail kind of content. I think that's a real shame, and that's the reason why informed.now exists: To fix that.

Nick Thompson: Yeah. Well, I think too, and you touched on this a little bit, what I've really honed in on in the last, I would even say maybe the last 6 years, but really the last 10 or 11 years or so, is when I woke myself up out of not giving a damn about any of this stuff, which was a nicer time maybe. What I really noticed was that when Trump was running for president, it broke so many people's brains and put the pedal to the metal, I think, on this sensationalized, hyper-polarized thing. But then what I think makes it even worse is the echo chamber. I use that term all the time to talk about what's happening to you on social media, what's happening with your YouTube algorithm, what's happening to you on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever you're using. They literally Meta-politically label you on a scale of moderate, extremely moderate, liberal, extremely liberal, conservative, extremely conservative. It's in your profile. You can go look at it. What that does is it takes your news consumption, social-media-izes it, makes it short, which is why everyone has ADD, makes it hypersensitive, hypersensationalized, and then that's all you see.

But then what happens is you're in this bubble of people that completely agree with you, and you're also in a bubble with people who hate the same things as you. So while you may see 10 opinionated news things coming at you, there's going to be that one that's the opposite of what you think, to trigger you and fuel that divide even more. These algorithms are reinforcing your beliefs in so many ways that I don't think we even think about. You go in and you open up your phone versus somebody else's phone and you see the different types of content people get, and it's all to reinforce biases, and that's so much worse than just watching the news or reading the news or anything mainstream. So you're getting all of this stuff and it's forcing you to not get an outside perspective, and then when you do get it, you're in this bubble where everyone in that bubble disagrees with it, so you still disagree with it.

And what I think is interesting is these biases have been driving wedges in the last 10 years, which is my whole point of this rant. They've been driving wedges in families and friendships, and I can't believe how many people I know have cut off family members over a difference in political belief. It's the way the world is being shown to us versus our friends and our families, and it's ruining families in some cases. I just think that's awful, and that's all because of this commentary disguised as news, in my opinion. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or want to share anything on that, but that's why I think what you're doing is so important.

Kira Shishkin: I love that you brought that up. News isn't just one of the main types of media. News is one of the most consequential layers of all media, right? We're not talking about entertainment, we're not talking about social media, we're talking about news, which defines how we understand and how we feel about the world that we live in, which has a direct impact on our sense of happiness, our sense of safety, our sense of well-being, and our decision-making. So it isn't just another flavor of media. It is the most consequential infrastructural understanding layer of how we live our lives. And so it's so important. I love that you brought up all these things that have been going wrong.

If I had to summarize my take and our company's thesis, traditional news is suffering a lot from advertiser incentives, right? All the news companies that we know of today are beholden to advertiser revenue, because they've become, unfortunately, advertiser businesses. And when you're an advertiser business, you optimize for different metrics. You optimize for how I can get Nick to click on this and read this for as long as possible so that I can feed him more and more ads. On the social media side, they're optimizing for engagement. They're optimizing literally to trigger you, right? Because once they trigger you to feel fear or anger or some sort of outburst, then you're engaging more, sending more messages, commenting more, and you're engaged on this platform.

The marriage of the two, which is this evil arranged marriage of social media with traditional legacy media, creates this news media ecosystem that is extremely unhealthy and extremely toxic, and it has all those capacities you mentioned to divide us and to make us feel alienated. We live in a world where everybody agrees with us, and then we encounter somebody outside of that world, and they're like, "Wait, you're crazy." It makes us incapable of productively, constructively disagreeing with other human beings, right? And that's very tragic. The whole urgency behind informed.now is to build a viable alternative that doesn't try to influence you, doesn't try to solicit you, doesn't try to advertise to you, and doesn't try to spin a story in a certain direction. That's why we're so proud to have users across the widest range of age, income, ideological spectrum, immigrant status, and languages. We have this huge melting pot of a user base, which is what the United States was always meant to be. And we're able to serve all of them in a genuine way, because we give them the infrastructure to make up their own mind on things. We believe that's how news media should have always been done. It hasn't been. So we're fixing it.

Nick Thompson: Yeah, which I think, and I'm going to show people what this looks like in a minute, because, you know, I just thought of this while you were talking there. When I first started my podcast, I was trying to figure out what to do with it and which direction to take. I knew I wanted to interview people. I wanted to talk about pretty much anything going on in the world. But I also was like, you know what really bothers me, as someone who was in journalism in high school and college, is the headline and how sensational they've gotten. I wanted to rewrite headlines. So sometimes when I'm doing a segment on YouTube, which everyone should go follow on YouTube, where I post shorter segments on topical news stories across a variety of different topics, I want to rewrite headlines and rewrite things so that people can see, here's how they're manipulating you with this headline to make you think something. Most people, even if they click, are going to read the lead, which is probably the first sentence or first paragraph of a news story. But all of these things, from the headline to the word choice, matter.

I actually just posted a video today that I recorded about student loans. One of the things that they had in the quote was they called the SAVE plan, which is something that the Biden administration did to lower student loan payments on a monthly basis almost by half. For some people it's even more than half of what it was. Well, the current administration is now taking that away, so people's student loan payments are going to go up. But the way they say it in these articles, they say "legally." So you're going to have to get on a legal repayment plan. And I'm like, they're using the word "legal" there. The SAVE plan is legal right now. They're trying to make people think they're on an illegal plan and going to get in trouble by the way that they're wording it. "You'll be able to get on a legal plan." Oh, I'm not on a legal plan right now, because I'm on this plan that is legal? It's all for fear. And so I even say that in the video. I'm like, look at the way this word is used. This word is designed in the sentence to make you think you're doing something illegal so that you hurry up and get off this plan and get onto one where they can make more money off of you.

I was just talking to my girlfriend at lunch today about this. I'm like, I don't know why I'm so skeptical of and question everything. Sometimes I wish I wasn't like this. But everyone's got to watch this stuff with a critical eye. And what I think is so good about what you're doing is, and we went through one of them and we're going to show people in a second, you take the facts out of an actual news story. So you're sourcing everything. I guess my question for you then is, how do you source these stories to make sure that they're factually correct? Then you share 5 or 6, I think, of the most important ones, is my count. How do you decide which stories to share, and what's your process for determining that they're factually correct?

Kira Shishkin: There's such an obvious answer, Nick, that it shocks most people, because they're like, "Oh yeah, that's the way you would do it." We look at primary sources, right? Instead of taking articles from the publishers, from the CNNs, NBCs, and Foxes of the world and trying to then de-noise them, we go directly to the source. We're very proud that some three quarters, if not more on any given day, of our sources are primary sources. Sometimes primary sources are not available. That's always possible. Sometimes there is no primary source for a story. But in most cases, and that's something that we really prioritize and focus on, we go directly to the source. If the White House said something, we're not going to get that from CNN. We're not going to get it from Fox News, either. We're going to get it from the White House instead. In fact, we're going to cite them. We're going to quote exactly what's been said. We're going to date it, attribute it, and cite it in a way that makes it really clear: "Hey, this is something that's happened, right? Here is the direct source."

We also cite our sources so that everybody can check exactly what the mother source is behind the story. So we focus a lot on central banks, public companies, governments, government agencies, and research organizations like the UN and WHO. Those are the organizations that are the prime movers of a lot of the news that actively shapes our lives on Earth. And we source them directly, instead of getting that secondhand, which is always thirdhand, which is always fourthhand, from other people talking about it. So the short answer is a religious level of loyalty to primary sources in our work.

Nick Thompson: Again, I think that is hard work that most people don't have time to do, and I understand that. I'm kind of a news junkie, and I'm like, "Oh, this is great." I think people just get overwhelmed. As I said before we were filming, I did a video on YouTube maybe 2 months ago because I was getting overwhelmed. I love consuming the news and the commentary and sharing my opinion and having debates and stuff like that, but I think a lot of people don't have the desire or the interest, or they've just totally lost trust and faith, as you pointed out, which is accurate. How did you know that there was a market for informed.now when you decided to actually start the organization?

Kira Shishkin: I mean, we didn't have to go far to feel the frustration firsthand and then see it across other people, right? The immediate circle around us. Are you feeling the same thing? Are you feeling like reading news is no longer a worthwhile experience? It's draining you. It's taking away more from you than it's giving you. And people are like, "Yeah, I can't read news anymore. I hate it." And it's not for a lack of interest. It's not for a lack of curiosity. I don't know how to say this in a nice way. It's fatigue. "I'm so tired of being manipulated. I'm so tired of having to read everything twice, having to read everything from the left side, from the right side, reading it from some other third side, reading some other counterbalancing agenda against the agenda that I've been presented with." But that's no way to get to the truth, right? If you're just counterbalancing one radical perspective with another radical perspective, you're not actually going to wind up in the middle. You're just going to wind up exhausted, confused, disoriented, and maybe also double radicalized, if that's a possibility. But it will lead you into a level of frustration that you're not going to last through. If that keeps happening for 3 to 5 times reading news, you're going to stop reading news.

And that's what's happened in America. People just stop reading news. They're like, "This is not worthwhile. I am not getting informed by the content that I'm reading. I'm not going to do this anymore." And as we heard, this resonates across a small group of people: me, my immediate surroundings, my friends, my community. Then we said, "Hey, can I talk to other friends? Can I talk to more people?" I would talk to people on the street all the time. I love talking to people on the street. You're like, "Hey, can I ask you some questions? Can I learn more about this?" And then we started scaling those experiments to larger-scale surveys, sending texts and emails to test this problem, because we keep testing even today. We're running a scaling business that is in a much more mature phase of its life than it was back in the day, but we're still testing. We're still confirming and learning how that demand is changing. And I've never seen so much resonance across such diverse people for the same thing: I want signal-rich information among all of this noise.

Nick Thompson: Yeah. And another thing, when you were talking, you get one radical side and then you get the other radical side. You also see stuff on social media that we never would have seen 15 to 20 years ago. Back then, the propaganda and the narratives worked better, and we didn't really know it was happening, but now it's like, "Don't believe your lying eyes" about stuff that you actually see on social media. I see people post stuff on Instagram or TikTok, and it's the total opposite of what someone in the news has said happened in Gaza, in Iran, wherever, pick it, right? It's crazy to me, because now, if you do try to consume the news as it is today, you've often seen or experienced something totally different in your own world.

One of the things I like to say, and I made jokes about earlier, is that when I tell people who aren't from here that I live in Chicago, they think I'm dodging bullets as I walk my dog. And it's not like that. I mean, someone was just shot today in the Loop, and it was kind of crazy, but it isn't the prominent thing that people who don't live here think. I don't walk around in fear of getting shot every time I leave my house, but people think Chicago's a war zone. So it's so clear to me, and then you see people seeing stuff on social media and being told they're liars, and it gets very confusing. It causes cognitive overload, and it leads you to this place. I'm a big fan of, and back here, Orwell's 1984 is on my wall. I don't know if you've read it, but there's a Ministry of Truth in that book, where everything's so confusing that they'll be the ones to tell you what's true. I don't want to end up in that type of world, but it feels like I could see how something like that could happen, because people don't know what's true.

The last thing I'll say on that, and then if you have any thoughts to add there: I think one of the most important things for us to do as a society, instead of burning ourselves out on the news, is to have things like informed.now. We need that. But I also think you've got to be conscious and mindful of what you consume, when you consume it, and how often you consume it. One of the things that I suggest to people, which this does, is to bucket it. I don't like to not know what's going on in the world, but if things get busy for me and a couple of days or hours go by, I set some time, and I scroll social media, I Google topics, I go to accounts, or I listen to shows, or whatever that is. I think bucketing it is a good way for us to not get so overwhelmed with it. Especially, as you said, when you've got the radical this side and the radical that side.

What's so dangerous is that the AI stuff is making it very confusing, and I literally have played with AI to the point where I can get it to source 2 completely opposite sides of a coin. So the internet gives you the ability to prove and disprove just about anything, and I think that's another scary thing. That was a little bit of a rant. I don't really think I have a question there, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on how people could manage their news, and how to decipher what's real and what's not, and be mindful of it.

Kira Shishkin: The frustration you're voicing, this description of the disorienting media environment that we find ourselves in, is very on point. All of the above are true, right? You can't trust social media, because social media is not designed with an editorial interest in truth at all. It's interested in virality, it's interested in engaging, it's interested in triggering you. So social media is not really a place for it, right? Traditional legacy media companies have become advertisement engines that clickbait and sensationalize everything in a structural way. They're beholden to a structural sensationalism. So that's not really a good place to go, either. Talking to your friends, that's not a way to get news, that's a way to discuss it potentially, but even then, it all comes down to where we are getting stuff from.

So what's left? This is how I like to frame it: The everyday American, every person in the United States, and I would say North America as well, since we also serve Canada, has 2 options. She can either read news that misinforms her, or she can spend 3 hours a day researching, double-checking, and triple-reading all the content to actually get to the bottom of what's going on. People know when they're being misinformed. People know when they're being influenced, and it's a terrible feeling, and it's not something that they would repeat over time, right? And spending hours a day researching news can be fun a couple of times, but then real life catches up. You're like, "Wait, I don't have time to actually do that anymore." And then you disconnect. So none of those paths is actually viable in terms of creating a sustainable solution for people to be informed about what's happening in their world. That's the state of play today, right? That's the state of the world we inherit. That's the media ecosystem we inherit.

And we're trying to reshape, reimagine, and evolve it with informed.now by creating an alternative that doesn't require you to spend all this time in the world, but also doesn't come with ulterior motives of trying to steal your data, track your privacy, violate cookie rules, or force information on you. It doesn't try to advertise to you anything. No sponsors, no advertisers, ever. And it doesn't sensationalize, because there's no incentive to sensationalize. Our only purpose is to inform you, right? Nothing is pushing us to do otherwise. I think that's the ultimate key: There are ulterior motives for every form of news media today. Our whole experiment with informed.now is to create a news media company that is free and independent of all these different incentives, of agenda and bias and solicitation and ads and clickbait and ragebait and all that sensationalist noise. That's the mission that we're on, and I think it connects directly to the frustration that you and I share and that you voiced earlier.

Nick Thompson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think a lot of people have seen that montage, well, there've been a few, of segments "brought to you by Pfizer," all these segments on COVID brought to you by Pfizer. I remember one that I saw right when COVID was starting. I don't even think lockdowns had happened, or maybe lockdowns had just happened, and I had the regular local news on. They did this whole few-minute segment about how flying in planes is safe because the air is super filtered and re-filtered, and it's actually probably safer than being in your house. Everyone had stopped buying plane tickets because they were scared. And at the end of the segment: "This segment has been brought to you by United Airlines. Fly the friendly skies." I'm like, I think I'm watching a documentary about how air is being filtered in airplanes, making it safer, and it's actually an ad essentially for United Airlines.

Those are the things that are everywhere in our media: Segments brought to you by this, and how it's reported. I think getting it from an unbiased, unbought, unsponsored, unadvertised source is the only way to go. A lot of the people that I follow and support that report the news are independent. They're not taking big money, or if they have advertisers, you've got to be skeptical of all that stuff. Same with influencers, same with anyone selling you something. You've got to approach it with a careful eye, because you always have to follow the money. Which brings me to ask you: How do you make money? And how do people know that there isn't something greater going on with the stories that are being presented to them or how they're being presented?

Kira Shishkin: It's a philosophical position that we're building something for people, for our user, for our reader, not for the advertiser, not for the sponsor, not for the investor, not for, insert your own ulterior motive. Not for the platform, not for the algorithm, right? The only way to walk that walk is to say, "Well, we're only going to accept revenue from the reader." If the reader wants us to exist, they will tell us by supporting us. If they do not want us to exist, then they will tell us the same. And if they don't want us to exist, we shouldn't exist. We shouldn't just live on like some sort of disease, like some sort of cancer, despite the will of the reader. The reader is the only voice that matters to us. Our capital independence, our editorial independence, our technological freedom and independence as a company is extremely unique. Of course, it's not unique to us, but it's definitely core to us. We don't depend on anyone else's support, so we don't have United or Pfizer telling us what to include in our stuff.

Because of this philosophical position, that if the reader doesn't want us to exist then we should not exist, we only accept revenue from a reader, and we do so through a very direct, simple relationship. If you like our work, you support us. It's about a cup of coffee a month. That's how much we charge. We make it intentionally affordable so that every single person can easily consider it. And if you don't want to support us, then no problem. We don't need to bother you. We are not trying to be a solution for every single person in the world, because people have different preferences. We're trying to be a solution for people that are looking for us, people who want this type of alternative. And for those people, we get very positive feedback from our readers. We see very strong loyalty, shown through retention of our readers, and very strong feedback saying, "Hey, this is buying back my peace of mind. This is a subscription to clarity. This is a subscription to a sense of confidence around what's going on around me." And that's priceless, right? That's more than a cup of coffee.

Nick Thompson: What I want to show people is how this news comes in over a text message. I'm going to share my screen. If you're listening to this on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else and you want to see how this looks, head over to YouTube. I'm going to show everyone this. You go to informed.now. Click start. Super easy to do. Then you put your mobile phone number in here, which I'm going to put a fake one, because I don't need my number on the internet. That's probably already out. You put in your number, put in your name, and then you pick what time you want to get the text on the news. To me, that was my favorite part, because one of the things that is so hard is that when you get your news all day, every day, it's very unstructured. So I like to get mine in the morning. I think I did 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, so that when I'm up and going and walking the dog, I can get my news, and maybe that'll become something that I cover on my YouTube show.

What happens then is, I want to show this over here. You put your name in and hit it. Then you get a text. And the cool thing is you get this little box here that allows you to add the number into your phone book along with the logo here. And then you get this text of the news, and this is what the news of today is. "Apple CEO Tim Cook steps down to be executive chairman and names John Ternus to take over the role. Cook led Apple from $350 billion to a $4 trillion market value over 14 years following co-founder Steve Jobs' death." And then it's sourced. As you can see, that is just facts. There's no opinion on whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing, or whether Tim Cook is stepping down because he's forced to. There's no speculation, there's no narrative here. This is literally just what happened.

Then you scroll down and you see this number 5, we'll use. "US military ends mandatory flu shots for troops, making vaccination voluntary and ending a long-standing requirement introduced in 1945." And again, it's sourced. No commentary on the flu shot, no commentary on whether or not the US military should be forced to take a flu shot or vaccinations. Here's a matter of fact of what happened. Now you can click through and read the story if you want to, but what you get with informed.now is a very simple sentence or two explaining exactly what happened. No bias, no narratives, no propaganda, no sensationalism. It's all just right there for you to read, and if it's something you want to look into or go get someone else's thoughts on, you have the option to do that on your own time. Is there anything you want to say?

To me this was very easy, and I like that I could save it as a contact, and then I get the nice orange little dot up there that gives me the logo, letting me know who it's coming from, just like if I added a picture of someone to my contact list. And then again, the simplicity of it, even to the point where it's a sentence or two. It's great. I actually knew about the Tim Cook thing, but I didn't know anything else, that he resigned. That's all I need to know about it. I don't need to hear anyone else's commentary on it.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you so much for walking through it, and it's very generous the way you described it. It's so simple. It's designed to be minimalist, right? We are pioneering an approach to news that counterbalances what's been the status quo for so many years, which is maximizing, sensationalizing, amplifying, screaming things as loudly as possible. We are counterbalancing that with a minimalist approach, a quiet approach, a signal-rich approach among all that noise. What we call news minimalism is essentially that essential baseline, factual briefing that will help you make up your own mind, but not influence you one way or another. That's the spirit of informed.now, and our product, which you've just gone through, is a direct representation of what we believe in. There are never videos or images or rich media, nothing jumping out at you. It is always brief. It's never more than around 1,600 characters, right? You're never going to get a message that's too much to read or too much to digest.

What we're doing with the product, in applying our philosophy, is not just reshaping the way news is delivered, which is unique to us, but also the way news is written. Other people have also tried writing news this way, not in retail environments like Fox or CNN, but there are others who write news in a very brief way. For us, how should I even say it, it's a combination of all those things that enables you to spend about 30 seconds, and we are redefining, reimagining the news reading habit itself. How do you consume news these days without researching forever, without being manipulated? It's this 30-second-a-day exercise at 9:00 a.m. or at 6:00 a.m., depending on when your morning starts. It's almost a return to that original morning paper ritual that I think has been lost and is missing from culture.

Nick Thompson: Yeah, I completely agree. And again, I think your approach here, being funded by your readers, is good social proof, right? There's no big tech investment coming in and saying you're going to report these things in this way. I think that's true independent media, or publishing, or whatever you wanted classified as, and I think we need more of that. I also encourage people, when they do consume news, to do it mindfully and ask yourself: Is this my thought that I'm having, or is this something someone else has put into my mind? It blows my mind how many people in my life recite a talking point to me. Sometimes I'm mean and I say, "Let me know when you have an original idea about this," but that's more playful.

When you get news like this, in this format, simple and in 1,500 characters or less or whatever, you can really start to form your own opinion and think about it without the influence. It's not that you're giving them the news, it's that you're giving them the space to process it on their own, without that bias coming in and that influence being portrayed. So I admire what you're doing. I think it's well needed. I encourage everyone to go sign up for it. I'm looking forward to using it and supporting you in any way that I can, and I'm very grateful to you for coming and talking about all this, because people don't want to talk about it. Like you've said, I think everyone knows, but they don't have a solution, so it's hard to talk about. Well, now we've got a solution, thanks to your work.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you, Nick. That's the mission: How can we make news reading worthwhile? Because it is much needed. I think we're in a critical thinking crisis today. I think we're in an epistemological crisis today, and the decay of the news industry is a very big component of the current crisis. It's time to rebuild. It's time to rebuild better. And we are working on an alternative to help people make up their own mind.

Nick Thompson: Again, this has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed talking to you, and I've been looking forward to this. We've had it scheduled for a little while. Before we wrap up and tell people how they can connect with you, I'll give you a chance to ask me anything if you have anything.

Kira Shishkin: I'm curious, Nick. I think about attention a lot in my life. I think attention is the superpower and the ultimate currency, the thing that really matters. What is something that you're spending a lot of time on these days, paying attention to, whether it's an activity, a person, or a relationship? I'm curious, where is your attention going these days?

Nick Thompson: That's a really good question, actually. I recently resigned from my job as a marketing executive and product management executive at a software company. It's been about 3 weeks, and I did it because there are 2 areas that I am really passionate about that I could pursue and find a way to support my living. I'm not a money-motivated person. I like money. I like to have it, but I don't need it at the cost of my own wellness, or to excessive amounts. I just want to fund the life that I live now. So I decided that I'm going to put my attention on 2 areas.

One of them is my marketing consulting business, which I'm hopefully going to turn into a bigger organization where I can consult tech startups and help them identify their ideal customer. I've heard you talk a lot about the customer: You've got to put the customer first. Most of them don't know who they're talking to or why they're talking to them, and they're not communicating well with their customers. They use internal speak instead of external speak. Kind of like you were saying earlier, you went out and listened to people's challenges with the news, and then you built a product to solve those challenges that these people shared with you about consuming the news. A lot of people don't know how to do that. They build the product first and look for the customer later. So I want to help them.

And then I've been spending a lot more time on this podcast and on YouTube. Again, this is just the last few weeks, and I'm really trying to get some of these messages out there. Like I said, I add my commentary, but I try to be very clear about what's my opinion versus what's the facts. I've been spending more time on YouTube and on my podcast trying to spread some of the stories people might not be seeing or might not get attention, because everything's crazy right now and it's one thing after another all day, every day. We have a president that has something to say every 15 seconds that starts a whole new news cycle, so there's a lot of stuff going on in the world. I'd like to share some of it with people that maybe aren't seeing these things. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, but I've been spending time doing that, and it gets me excited, because I'm realizing I really miss journalism. I miss investigating stuff. I miss doing it with space to really analyze it.

So those are 2 areas that I've been spending a lot of my time on, literally the last 3 weeks or so. And then I need to spend more time on my girlfriend and my relationship, because with all the things that I've been focused on and doing lately, I feel like I haven't been as present. So I'll be open and vulnerable there that I'm also working on that.

Kira Shishkin: No, that's awesome. These are great focuses that you're cultivating, and thank you for sharing that.

Nick Thompson: Yeah, thank you for asking. That was a good question. Usually I get a good question, but that one was different than I've ever had before. So, thank you. Tell people where they can find you. We already showed them where they can sign up for informed.now, but you can say that again, and everyone knows links will be in the show notes.

Kira Shishkin: If there are folks who are interested in a new way of staying informed, a new way of reading news without the noise that surrounds it traditionally, we are looking for our people, the news minimalists among your listeners. Our brand name is also our website. If you go to informed.now, you will get right to the source, our minimalist website, where you can learn a lot more about our mission and also sign up so that you can join the media minimalist revolution.

Nick Thompson: I love it. Well, thanks again so much. I could probably talk to you for 4 hours about this stuff, if not longer. So thank you for taking the time. Everyone, those links are down below where you can visit informed.now, and we'll have to do this again sometime. We'll be keeping in touch, but thank you for coming on.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you so much for having me. This has been delightful.