The Truth Economy: How informed.now Restores Trust in What You Read

Listen or watch on Rebekah Panepinto Project, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Castro, Poddtoppen, iHeartRadio, and Audible.

Highlights

Rebekah Panepinto traces Kira's path from Ukraine and Israel to Los Angeles, then asks how informed.now separates signal from noise. He credits primary sources, which supply most of the stories, and explains why the team has never sent a second alert for breaking news. Kira also sorts readers into 3 groups and describes Circuit, his global community for builders.

Top Quotes

"If you're consuming news, it doesn't mean you need to be consumed by news." (Kira Shishkin)

"There's no watermark in news that says, hey, this is actually sensationalized, dramatized clickbait, it isn't factual information." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Rebekah Panepinto: Welcome to the Rebekah Panepinto Project. Today I am very excited to host Kira. He is the founder and CEO of informed.now, delivering news without the noise to leaders and decision makers. He is a serial entrepreneur and an investor as well as an adviser to scaling tech companies.

Kira's past entrepreneurial experiences include co-founding a new marketplace business within an enterprise environment at Intuit and founding as well as operating one of the largest crypto mining operations within Eastern Europe. Beyond entrepreneurship, Kira's background within technology also includes investment banking, strategy advisory, as well as private equity and venture capital investments into category leading companies.

We had a very interesting conversation today. You'll be able to learn more about Kira's company called informed.now and a unique way to be able to consume news content. Enjoy the show.

Kira, welcome to the show today.

Kira Shishkin: Rebekah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yes. So excited. I know you've been globe trotting all over and now finally back in one spot. So excited to dive into the conversation today and learn more about the work you're doing at informed.now.

Kira Shishkin: I am grateful to be here again. Thank you for welcoming me onto the show. I'm excited to talk about informed.now, Circuit, and kind of my life leading up to this, and I'm really excited for the chat.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yeah, we've got to talk about it. I would call you a global citizen. You know, time in Israel, on the East Coast, on the West Coast, some time in Ukraine even. You've definitely been a lot of really interesting places, and I'm curious to hear about what that journey looked like and what's led you to where you are now on the West Coast today.

Kira Shishkin: It's funny you mentioned a little bit of time in Ukraine, because that's actually where I was born and raised. That was the first destination on my global citizen journey. So my life began in Ukraine. I was born and raised in Kiev, which is the capital of Ukraine.

It's actually a kind of Russian Ukrainian family. My father was a first generation Ukrainian, and my mother's side, she was a second generation Ukrainian coming from Russia, from the Soviet Union. So growing up, I got to see their identity shape and become chosen towards Ukraine, transitioning from a Russian identity, or Soviet identity, to Ukrainian.

As I was growing up, I spent the first decade roughly in Ukraine, in Kiev. And then through an unfortunate series of events, we wound up in Israel, and I spent almost a decade coming of age there, becoming a young man. Then as I started thinking of next steps, what else the world has to offer, I started thinking about the United States. That's really because this remains, despite all challenges to this claim, a place for dreamers and a place for people who want to effect a change in the world and have an impact.

I came to New York. Then I moved to Chicago, and then I moved to San Francisco, and now I'm in Los Angeles. But I don't think I'll be here forever. I think I'm going to keep moving around quite a bit. So that's in a nutshell my life journey, geographically speaking.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yeah. I mean, it keeps life interesting to see different cultures, and even just in the US how diverse different states can be, and different cultures amongst people that are just a state away. It's a wild, wild thing.

Kira Shishkin: I mean, the US is so culturally rich and diverse beyond just the obvious delineations. There are so many flavors of Americans, and I think that's really beautiful, and people don't give enough credit. Especially Americans, they kind of think you want to go foreign, you want to go explore the world. It's like, yes, but have you seen all the 50 states? The natural, cultural, and social riches of this country are second to none, and it's worth traveling locally, seeing this country for what it is. I've had a chance to do that personally, and I couldn't recommend that enough.

Rebekah Panepinto: So today with informed.now, you really come at your technology startup with an angle of news, and you say sharing news without the noise. I would assume you have a different take even on news, being that you didn't grow up the way that in America maybe we consume news, or the garbage that is some of the news, unfortunately, that is out there. This really, I would think, brings a good global perspective for you to be able to make sure that people are getting quality news.

So I'm curious about your take. When you started to build informed.now and you had this passion and this light went off for, hey, let's create news without the noise, what did that look like for you? With the angle you were coming at, where did there need to be some changes made to make sure, especially in the US, that we're consuming quality content and not the garbage that may be floating around day to day?

Kira Shishkin: I think this is a really consequential moment in US history. Since roughly 2016, there was a phenomenon. I think it's the Oxford dictionary, I think it's the website, I don't remember. There's a dictionary out there that publishes every year the word of the year. It's not the most popular word. It's a word that describes the zeitgeist, the ethos of the time. And in 2016 it was post-truth, and people were like, what is that word? We never heard of it before. It's sort of like postmodern. It's a graduation from a world that is rooted in truth.

The reason I mention that naming is that it's been 10 years since the beginning of a world that in many ways is no longer as concerned with truth and more around sensationalism, loud stories, clickbait, attention-grabbing phenomena. Obviously the rise of TikTok from 2020 until 2025 is showcasing the strength, or rather the weakness, of truth. It's a very fragile thing.

We observe that in the news media, which is one of the most important channels for learning about the world that we inhabit, understanding what decisions we could be making to make our lives better, and just being aware of what's going on around us, which is a very basic human need. In the news industry, we've seen a lot of the industry turn into entertainment, turn into clickbait, emotional response triggering, and a lot of sensationalism that is not consistent with the power of facts.

The observation of that is the animating spirit behind what we're doing with informed.now, which is essentially restoring the dignity of being informed back to the everyday American, back to the everyday person. You can get informed without being influenced. You can get informed without being overwhelmed in the process. You can get informed without being drained. That's the mission of informed.now, and the soapbox I've been on for some time now.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yeah. You think about these roles now out there of people helping to dispel misinformation, and it's everywhere. Or you'll get a popup on your social media like, this could be misinformation. But the reality is, when there are things that are not true, there's got to at least be a disclaimer. I would think eventually, with AI generated photos and things like that, there'll have to be a little note at some point to be like, hey, this is for entertainment purposes, or this is AI.

Where is that line drawn? And how are you making sure you do filter out what is the misinformation, what is some kind of clickbait, and instead make sure what you're serving up is just absolute truth and content that is valuable to your reader?

Kira Shishkin: I love that you mentioned this little disclaimer, because Sora, the new video generation and image generation model from OpenAI, is obviously very popular right now. Folks have been using it, and it has this watermark on the video saying this is Sora. This is a signal that this isn't a real video, and sometimes people need that. There is no version of that for news. There's no watermark saying, hey, this is actually sensationalized, dramaticized clickbait, it is not factual information.

And yeah, we should have that. That's not a bad idea. We should have some version of a standard around, maybe we can just call this journalistic integrity. Some standard around, hey, the content you're consuming is not meant to be factual or is not meant to be precise. There isn't a tool like that. There aren't incentives for that tool to exist in the industry. I have very low hope that it's ever going to exist.

So the endeavor of every news reader in the world right now is trying to find the truth, trying to find the facts, trying to find what's actually going on amidst this sea of noise that seems to be proliferating at great speeds, sensationalizing, click baiting, advertising, being very verbose. It's just this constant machine of words and content and images. You have to take that and decipher, okay, what here is actual signal in all this noise?

And that's exhausting. It's the reason most people don't read news anymore, especially in America. It's an exhausting experience, and you're tired, you're busy, you have other things to do. You can't spend a few hours a day deciphering the signal from the noise of news, which is why we do that for you. We believe the power of facts is a human right of sorts. It's something that we all should have, or at least have access to.

So we do that hard work for you: the research, the scanning, the cross referencing, the checking, to identify and convey the facts that are shaping the world. That's the work of informed.now, and I can get into some more detail if you like as well.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yeah. Is it your AI fighting another AI, versus just knowing certain platforms are biased? Where does that kind of check and balance come in to what makes it to the informed.now delivery system versus what gets put by the wayside, like, no, my readers aren't going to see this?

Kira Shishkin: Let's get specific. I love this push. I think it's all of the above. One, it is our AI versus other folks' AI. It's ironic, but there are two sides in the news media industry that are leveraging AI in different ways. One side leverages AI to create noise, to spin up articles and words and content at hyper speed, which AI is so good at. Most of the AI we're using is large language models, which are excellent at word vomiting.

In an industry that is looking to misinform, to mislead, to entertain in some ways, that can be a really powerful tool. It can also be a very malicious tool. The rise of AI adoption is faster among bad actors than among the good actors, so we're seeing a lot of AI being used to create noise and to create misinformation as well.

We're on the other side of this battle, leveraging AI to de-noise, declutter, and tease things apart, to understand irregularities: where facts are disagreeing, where language is being charged for no apparent reason, where things are being manipulated. So there's definitely a difference in leveraging AI in different ways. We think of ourselves as folks who declutter news, and there are countless solutions in the market right now looking to help writers or publishers clutter the news more, generate noise to flood the channel. We don't stand for that. That's one big difference.

Number two is we have a secret weapon, and our secret weapon is really obvious. We take our news two thirds of the time from primary sources. So instead of taking it from someone else who is taking it from someone else, secondhand or third-hand reporting, we're able to tap into the primary sources, whether that's the White House, the central bank, the United Nations, the European Union, a government announcement from the Middle East, or a company announcement. We take it from the horse's mouth.

Very few journalists or large publications actually take it from primary sources and are able, with a high level of fidelity, to preserve that meaning and even share the source with the reader. In our work, we give our readers access to the primary source. If you want to click to learn more on one of our summaries in the texts that we send, it will take you directly to the bill of Congress, the Supreme Court case, the ruling on a stay from a federal judge. Nobody does that.

It's almost weird that the pillars of American journalism are not taking the readers seriously enough to give them the primary source, to show them what the Supreme Court actually said instead of regurgitating it for them. So I think that's the second piece: our loyalty, our faithfulness to primary sources.

Rebekah Panepinto: Now, when it comes to the informed.now platform, what are the main topic areas that you're serving up consistent news on to your readers? I would assume on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Kira Shishkin: We text every morning of every weekday, and we skip the weekend, but we don't actually skip it. We cover all of the weekend on Monday instead, bothering no one on the weekend. We really believe in what we call media mindfulness, which is this idea that you don't have to be consumed by media. If you're consuming news, it doesn't mean you need to be consumed by news. I think that's a really important distinction. Most of the time there's no business reading news on the weekend. Just live your life. And there's no business really reading news for most people more than once a day, in the morning. You have other things to do.

So we keep a very distilled format, really focusing on news at the right time and just the right amount of news, just the news that's worth reading. It's a very efficient approach to news insight.

You asked about the content. We don't think of our curation as thematic, where we focus on technology, science, and politics. It's not thematic but rather based on significance. We're looking at news that is changing the world, things that are really going to change the lives of millions and change the safety, the livelihoods, the security, and the choice and freedom of large groups of people. That's the scale of news that we look at.

Because we're filtering on significance and not on a theme, we're able to have coverage across many different domains. They cycle regularly through politics, international relations, military and security issues, business, economy, culture, society, scientific breakthroughs, and technological breakthroughs, matters of that scale. So it really cycles through a lot of different themes, but always with the main question in mind: Does this change the world? If it doesn't, you're going to have to read about it somewhere else, somewhere where they're going to sensationalize it. With us, we focus on these most important changes.

Rebekah Panepinto: Are there real time updates for, I'll say, dramatic world events, too? An assassination, an accident, things like that. Are there certain things that will trigger a second text from informed.now to your users?

Kira Shishkin: It's possible. We have never done that. We certainly can. First of all, we monitor news 24/7. It's not like we are only doing it at a certain hour. We're monitoring the world on an ongoing basis, so we have the capacity and the ability to do that. We have not seen a news item in the last 10 months or so, just to take a sample range, or really ever, that was worth alerting someone to in real time, because it goes against the grain of our media mindfulness approach.

If it's something so critical, so world changing, essentially an update around an earthquake coming to a huge chunk of the world, and we somehow are the first people to learn about it, it's possible. We have never been in that position where we would double text someone, because we believe that reading news 24/7 is not helpful for the individual. It's draining. It's overwhelming, and it doesn't necessarily give you the value of being informed. Being informed is about knowing what's going on at the right time. Following real time breaking news alerts is extremely demanding, and if anything, it's going to distract you and disorient you in the context of your own daily life.

So while we can, we have never felt the need to do that. I don't want to say never say never, and I don't want to say this is ever going to happen, but we see so much news on a daily basis that the bar for something that is going to trigger that level of notification is extremely high. I have a hard time imagining what that would be, honestly, because the alternative is you get it in real time instead of every 24 hours. Breaking that 24 hour cycle, I mean, how important is this really going to be? We're keeping a pulse on things for you every 24 hours. You're going to be in the know very shortly. Do you know what I mean? It would be a lot to text more than that.

Rebekah Panepinto: You want to be respectful of whatever is going on in the individual's world. Something you may deem urgent, when you know their grandfather is at the hospital with cancer, may not sit well, because that's not their urgency.

And yeah, on top of that, there are better sources for real time breaking things.

Kira Shishkin: And we don't want to compete in that space. If you're someone who's looking for real time breaking news, there are so many better sources than us to deliver that, so we wouldn't play in that space. We focus on media mindfulness, not on breaking news, attention strain, or attention domination.

Rebekah Panepinto: I'm curious, what does your user base look like then? Who are the people that are media mindful? Is it a millennial user base? Is it more the later generations, maybe the boomers that are taking to this content? Who are those users that are really coming in and digesting everything from informed.now on a daily basis?

Kira Shishkin: I think it's divided into three categories, but they're also changing. We have a pretty diverse base with a lot of little subgroups. The first category is the frustrated millennial, maybe older millennials who have seen enough life now and think, why can't I just get neutral news? Why can't I just get objective news? It's this frustration with the legacy news media, and it gets older than millennials as well. We have folks in the Gen X bracket who feel like, wow, it's refreshing to see something that isn't tainted with bias or with clickbait. They're coming to us from a place of frustration, like, I wish this existed, I wish we just had news that serves me, the reader. They're finding that finally through us.

Then we have the category of the younger person: very young millennials or Gen Z, maybe even younger Gen Z. We don't really have any Gen Alpha just yet, because they're still not interested in the rest of the world. They're still concerned with their immediate environment. The younger folks come to us because they're born in such an AI native, social native, internet native world. They have a really high BS filter. They think, I'm not reading this, this is clearly trying to manipulate me, I can see it. I can tell this is misleading. Legacy news is cringe, as they would say.

So they're looking for these new age solutions that are designed to honor their attention, because they are way too selective. They wade through the TikTok clickbait that permeates the generation, and they have a much higher BS filter that doesn't let legacy news media through altogether. They're looking for solutions like ours to get informed without triggering their BS filters.

The third type is less generational and more of a behavioral demographic. It cuts across a little bit, and those are the busy professionals who are absurdly busy. We're talking about investors, executives, top operators, and entrepreneurs who need to stay informed to make decisions about their business, their environment, and their family, but they don't have the time to dive deep. They look to us for a briefing in between an Uber Black ride and the boardroom they're going to be speaking at. In that little window, the elevator ride up the skyscraper or whatever the building is, that quick wire of what they need to know so they can feel like the smartest person in the room and know what they're talking about and how these things affect their business.

Rebekah Panepinto: I like it. And I'm sure those different demographics that consume informed.now will just expand over time as well, as different cultures get introduced to things they care about and want a different way to be able to consume the news.

I want to talk a little bit now about your advisory work as well. You work with Circuit, and you're focused on helping build intentional communities and even just your community around you. Though it may be global in some cases, you really care about making sure people are connected and that there's community in all these different areas and passions that people have. So tell us about that work and what gets you excited to continue to spend your extra time there.

Kira Shishkin: I think if you are someone who has been helped in the past, and I feel like that categorizes a lot of us, we've all received some help from someone. Just the experience of being helped by someone, whether that's a mentor, a guide, a boss somewhere along your career journey, or just in personal life, someone who's shown you the way before you. At least for me, I experienced a kind of chain reaction of, I want to pass that on, and it feels really good to be able to serve that role for someone else. It's a very natural progression of being in a place of receiving help at some point in your career or life journey, and to me it's always been intuitive to pass it on.

I've received a lot of help throughout my life through strangers, through cold outreach, people that I've just met. I had no connection, no stakes in my game, and they've helped me. That generosity and kindness has always propelled me to want to advise and connect others who are on a journey of building something, whether that's their own project, their own life, or some sort of solution for the world. I admire that and glorify that in my personal value system, and I want to help people, because it's hard work to be a builder. It's hard work to be a creator of a solution for the world, and it's very often very isolating, very selfless work. So I'm always motivated to build community around the act of creating, the act of building, and try to be as helpful a resource as I can.

You mentioned Circuit. Circuit is a global community designed for people who are builders, creators, and dreamers. People who are constructively unsatisfied with the state of the world and want to do something about it. They want to have an impact. That's in media, in technology, in healthcare, in real estate. It doesn't matter what their industry affiliation is. It's folks who crave to instigate a change for the better, and it can be a very isolating world for a builder. We cultivate a community to facilitate mutual helpfulness, to help each other and motivate each other through tough moments. That gives a lot of meaning and purpose to my life, beyond the work and the mission I'm on with informed.now. With Circuit, I have a lot of personal meaning behind community building with folks who share the charity with me.

Rebekah Panepinto: Yeah. Community now is not just who lives down the street or went to your college. It really can be global, and you can search the world to find your people. Then with intentionality and platforms like Circuit, you can stay consistent with that to build relationships that are just as strong and encouraging as if they were someone you went to college with. So I love it. I think it's the way of the future. I love that you're giving a platform to it and helping make this global world feel a lot more tangible and a lot more communal.

I want to wrap now with just one final question, and it's around principles, which I'm sure is something that you have thought about in the past, because you seem like a very principled person. I'm curious, what is the guiding principle that you've lived by to be successful in business?

Kira Shishkin: Gosh, I have a lot. I'm a big motivational quotes and sayings type of guy, and I think a lot of them underpin principles, so I have a lot of them. Maybe I'll mention this one. I think people underestimate how good it feels to help others. It feels better to help others than even being helped in the first place by others. It feels really good to be useful to other people, and that feeling, that experience in itself, is very human. I think it's very universal. I don't think it's specific to me.

I know so many people who have also experienced the joy of being helpful to other people and also say, hey, that actually feels much better than getting help. To be of service, to be of help, feels much better than being helped by others. I think people really underestimate how good that feels, and they shy away from it sometimes. They worry about giving without getting something back. I think that's reasonable and that's fair. But the act of giving other people your time, your attention, your service, whatever that means in the context, is in itself a very delightful experience. A lot of people underestimate that and shy away from it.

So a guiding principle that I have is to be a giver, be a helper, and just enjoy the act of that without expecting some sort of return on that investment. Not everything has an ROI.

Rebekah Panepinto: Kira, I love all that you're doing. Thank you so much for coming to share on informed.now and Circuit and your world traveling and the impact you continue to make. We wish you all the best and are excited to keep tabs on where informed.now takes you.

Kira Shishkin: Rebekah, thank you so much for having me. It's been delightful, and I'm happy to touch base anytime about any of these things. It's my passion, my world, and I'm really grateful to share that story with you.