You're Not Informed — You're Being Played | Kira Shishkin of informed.now

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Ian take it away. All right. Welcome back to the comics podcast where two genics dad sit down with interesting people

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And it's something pretty special. We don't take that lightly now today's guest is a really interesting one

Because this conversation sits right in the middle of something we talk about on this show all the time

Information narratives and how the heck normal people are supposed to make sense of the world anymore our guest today is Kira

Shishkin a four time entrepreneur investor and the founder and CEO of a company called informed

Which is basically trying to solve the modern problem that all of us are feeling right now

We're drowning in information, but somehow still starving for clarity

Kira welcome to the show man

Well Ian Jared, thank you so much for having me

Yeah, thanks for coming up

Absolutely, man

Now Kira before we even get into the company I have to ask when you speak four languages

Does that mean you also get four different versions of the news depending on which language you're reading it in?

You don't need to go as far as different languages to get four different versions of the news

That's true, good point

All right, so you built a nine-figure marketplace into it which is no small feat man

So what made you step away from that world and decide the next problem worth solving was how humans consume information

Yeah, that was a really exciting

That was a really exciting chapter in my career being able to build something

Is an incubation within a larger enterprise environment that has so many resources and so much

You know just so much potential to go from zero to one very very quickly even zero to 100 very quickly

And that was a really exciting experience

The marketplace that we built as now known as TurboTax full service which is a huge business for into it

And we did in a very small lean team

I've stepped away from that because the urgency of the problem that we're solving now has continued to accelerate, get amplified and just keep going back in front of my face

Wow, I really want to do something about what I call misinformation overload

What? There's misinformation out there? No way

Yeah, it was wild for every once and everything else, yeah

Yeah, that's pretty crazy

So how's it work man?

Yeah, how's that work?

Yeah, it's designed with the utmost simplicity in mind

To achieve the effect of the scale that we need in order to change the way facts are consumed the way news are read by the everyday person

It needs to be really really simple and it needs to be really really minimalist

So in the form. Now, which is the name of the project is the is the leading news by SMS service in North America

What that means is you get your news by text by SMS

If you're in any of the states of the it states or if you're in Canada each as simple as texting our toll free number

You don't have to text at once and it's toll free so you never charged for for texting us

Or go to our website which is informed on now where you know through a very brief sign-up process it takes about three to five seconds

You enroll kind of in our program which is facts by SMS I shouldn't even call it the news by SMS it's facts by SMS

So how do you curate your facts like where are you getting that information from because like Kino we said earlier like polarization is on every news platform

So how do you guys ensure that what you're sending out to people is just the facts

Yeah, it's it's such an obvious answer and yeah, it's a forgotten art in in journalism and the reporting industry in just the media

Englomerance that we inherit

But we go to primary sources in fact 80% of our coverage

It pulls from primary sources meaning if someone said something you know we only have two options

We have one option is to actually listen to the horses mouth and we can we can talk to the horse itself

Or we can go to the barn and talk to a bunch of pigs who talk to the birds and they talk to the dog and the dog heard from a horse

And we can get our news that way and so to us the option was very obvious and yet as we navigated or observed the landscape of media

Everybody was in the barn mixing with the rest of the animals and so we thought why don't we just go to the horse and and get the information as clearly as we can

We never assert things to be true so unlike other news that you read right they claim hey Trump is the worst person Trump is the best person

Hey Epstein Epstein Epstein there's all this noise where they suggested commentary kind of like a talk line as to how you should feel about it

We don't assert anything we attribute information to sources where we would we get them

And so for example we would say here the White House claims these are the goals of the epic fury operation in Iran

Right so you know the CDC claims that these numbers are down of a certain disease

But we're never asserting things we are attributing kind of inside to where we got it from

And we are really really specialized in getting to the primary sources and surfacing that level of clarity to our user

We go through all the government agencies all the governments of the world central banks

You know large research foundations that have credibility to to publish the one they publish

We go through you know Supreme Court cases bills of Congress very original documents that give us the closest we can get to the base facts

Wow incredible man and ladies and gentlemen if you didn't pick it up cure is a 2018 public speaking champion

What an excellent answer there man

What an incredible design I mean the way you just put that together I think that's something people can really resonate with

You know I mean most people feel overwhelmed by the news right now right every platform is screaming for attention from your perspective

Is this an accident of technology or is it actually the system working exactly the way it was designed?

I love that question and I think the systems design changed substantially over time and it has betrayed the user in the process

Right and you gentlemen can obviously relate to this but during the 2004 era when everybody could get online

And a published distribute information there was a proliferation of kind of like blog level content

There came a point where the user the reader said hey there's there's I want to pay for news there's so much free stuff out there

That was a very dangerous decision made at scale because people stopped paying for news

And when people stopped paying for news the news the newsrooms the companies that well how are we going to support our work which is important and expensive

And suddenly they hear knock on the door and they open the door and it's the advertisers the whole barn of them

Right and they say hey news is going to be free don't worry about charging the users the readers we're going to pay for everything

Just save us a little bit of real estate on the left side and a little bit on the right side so that we can advertise to your user

So it's free for them but you know we get their data we value the privacy and we sell sell sell as much as we can

So initially it was like it's an interesting work in the road and and eventually the whole industry said that's the only way we can survive

By so much so that by like early 2010s mid 2010s every single company that does news media has transitioned into an advertising company

Whether they sell the real estate to another ad engine like Google or anything of a sort or they run their own ad engine

They stop being facts companies they stop being reporting companies they started being advertisement companies with news as the bait

And so we find ourselves early 2020s in a moment where the incentives of the industry of a news are contradictory to the incentives of us as readers

In fact they're antagonistic in a way what does that mean their goal is to hijack attention

And to hold it hostage for as long as possible because that's how they make money that's how they survive that's how they operate the business

Which obviously results in clickbait rage bait sensationalism verbosity adds that are invasive that are everywhere

It results in by sort of a separate issue but it goes hand in hand and that level of noise is not what the reader ever wanted

The reader wanted to get informed and get out and we're bringing that back on the table

And I find that incredible man because we talk a lot on the show like you just said about manufactured narratives right

Not necessarily conspiracies just the reality that every institution frames reality in its own way right

Do you think people are waking up to that or are we still like mostly stuck inside our algorithmic bubbles

I think I think people waking up to it for sure perhaps slower than then I would like to see it

But the statistics completely show it you know the proof is in the data

And the data is showing that the news readership especially across generations like a gen X may still read news although I don't know too many that do

And you know go to millennials you go to Gen Z there's less and less readership there is less there's higher and higher BS filters as you get all younger

And there is just no interest in considering legacy news such that the legacy news industry is just unable at this point to attract new readers

Which is a death sentence and is not sustainable because ultimately you know over a longer period of time what the user wants is always going to win

It's not what the industry wants and so we see it in the statistics already we see that folks don't read the news folks don't trust the news

It's only matter a few more years of this continuing where people completely stop completely resign and the industry is going to have to either evolve itself substantially or be evolved forcefully by players like us who are not going to take noise or an answer

Yeah I think we kind of saw that with newspapers too right like I'm old enough to remember that that's how most people consume their news was the daily newspaper that they got

And that kind of went away when digital came along and I think kind of platforms like yours or maybe the next evolution and how people get their news

And you know I'll scroll through my news feeds now and if I click on something one it's either paid walled so I can't read the article which is freaking annoying

Or it says generated by AI and AI can make mistakes right so how do you think about like the rule of AI and news curation versus human editorial judgment where it is informed not now land on that

Totally we have we have very strong stances we were born in Silicon Valley we I was in technology my my kind of whole career

And we have a very clear eye view of what AI is good at and what AI is bad at and also where we are in the kind of state of the eye

We are really in the early stages where so many of the use cases that we fantasize about are still out of reach

And if you're able to be quite realistic about that then I think you can get ahead

But if you were kind of how the the every person is which is either AI is going to save the world is going to you know ruin the world

That level of like extremist fluctuation is not really helpful there are right jobs for AI today which are primarily in analysis

There are a lot of wrong jobs that he just isn't capable of the eyes until today is not capable of reasoning

Not capable of awareness that we require real large training and memory windows that is it doesn't have and it doesn't have empathy

You know it also doesn't really think outside of the box because all that it does is guess the best next word to come in a sequence

So it's it's aimed for predictability and news isn't always predictable and even if it was I'm not trusting a machine that cannot reason with facts

And so with informed about that we are very technologically enabled we're very AI enabled but ultimately everything that comes out of our ecosystem is is human supervised

And there is no other way around it because we take responsibility for our content right we are not some AI slop app that is use at your own risk

That's we're going to lead that to perplexity right if you want to get news from perplexity you say perplexity give me news don't make a mistake

And it's going to give you things that you're going to need to double check triple check when you get content from informed up now and you get your news from us

We put our whole reputation on the line every single day and if we get it wrong we deserve to lose you as a customer

Yeah like that standpoint

Yeah definitely man

Now Kira you went through a serious accident man left you dealing with disability for years I mean

On what's like that tend to change how you prioritize life right I mean did that experience shape the way you think about time attention and information?

Yeah I'm glad you bring that up because you know it makes this whole story a lot more personal for me and there was a time in my life and I was a young lad

When I couldn't wield my attention as a result of the accident that I was I would take them off and I couldn't wield my attention like I couldn't focus I couldn't learn I couldn't remember things

I also had a huge kind of memory loss pain on my life up to that point and and that was the biggest loss I could ever imagine right like I would have given up a limb just to have my brain

Our back and it was very difficult I think you know the years of uncertainty the years of

It's like ambiguity in terms of like am I going to be able to remember things again am I going to be able to learn again am I going to be able to focus again

And the length of time in that last that was was very very difficult and it's sort of in my mind in my heart painted this image of this like disoriented state

I would never want to relive I would never want people I care about which is everyone I care about I care about you guys care about everybody I don't want anyone to relive that experience or experience that in the first place

And when I come to native states it's about a decade ago now and I see that America is artificially creating that state for its citizens and for people around the world

And I'm like no no no no no no there there has to be a better way and I'm not saying we're going to suggest I'm not suggesting that we're going to save everybody right everyone has their own cup of tea

But we want to build a viable strong alternative for the people that do not wonder attention jeopardized and disoriented we want to give them the tools to make up their own mind

Do you know that's amazing and now Nelloki you're basically building the anti doom scrolling machine dude if you succeed half of X is going to lose its entire business model man I just want that

You know if something is someone listening right now wants to reclaim their attention and stop feeling like they're drowning in news what's one habit they could start tomorrow cure

I think we don't give enough credit to the attention audit exercise and I'm not actually sure if I invented this I probably didn't I probably just named it

But everyone's in a while the month can do the quarter just do an attention audit of like water all the places in my day in my week

Where my attention is being demand or being somehow used that can be conversations relationships can be media that you consume

And just like do a little audit of like where where am I being pulled to focus on and once you write it out because the experience of writing out things

It forces a different layer of thinking you can't do it in your head the fidelity of thought in our head when it just verbalize in our head is very very low it needs to be expressed in writing or be better in a conversation with a friend

Then you really suggest new thoughts to a much more rigorous inquiry

Do you have attention audit once in a while to it now take five minutes to do it and see are all these places where my attention is being

That hostage or being hijacked is that what I want to happen and if news is is

Art of that audit of yours think about think about informed on now and the mission of you know putting the power of facts back in your palm

Yeah, I really love that idea of attention audit like I see so many zombies out there just doom scrolling constantly for hours

Like I've seen people do for hours and I'm just like hello like hello come back to earth

We've all done it too like we've all been there we've all been those people I feel like just a few just last week

I called myself in a moment where I was doing scrolling for hours and it's like is another person I want to be this is not how I want to be influenced

How do I get rid of this?

Yeah, that famous rabbit hole man

Yeah, my my TikTok algorithms figured out I love funny cat videos that are AI generated

They make me laugh man I found one the other day it made me laugh so hard almost fell over so it's pretty fun

I mean there's some fun things out there but yeah, I like that idea of the attention audit that's totally cool

And it's interesting to to hear you speak here because I've had people flagged us down before and they said hey man

I love listening to your show in the morning on the way to work, right?

That means the those legacy outlets like you were talking about man people are ditching them dude they're coming to Jared and I now in our podcast

Listening to us on the way to work and on the way home from work and it's like they can get away from that news noise pollution

You know like this whole bipartisan politics and everything I've heard you talk about media minimalism man

That's it's interesting because our culture is built on more content more updates more notifications

Right do you think the future might actually swing the other direction toward people intentionally consuming less?

Yeah, I think the move towards purposefulness is inevitable

I think it's going to get worse before it gets better

I think with the emergence of AI or the adoption of the eye within the media industry is going to create so much noise before it ever gets cleaned up

So much so that you know it's it's the number one use case or a large language model is to regurgitate words

And it's getting better and better at doing it doesn't mean it can handle facts doesn't mean it can reason

We don't have technology that can reason as of today nowhere in the industry do we have AI that's artificial reasoning

We only have artificial word clouds and really sophisticated word regurgitation

But text itself right in the media generally but text itself is the number one kind of domain for AI to be applied to and it's already being applied

Right you're just already being fed all these AI videos in his feed but I think in the next couple of years and it might be sooner

Right we're going to arrive at a place where the channels are so flooded with AI content that is indistinguishable from any other content

Because it's getting better and better all the time such that it's paralyzing I mean people already feel quite paralyzed before AI was even around the corner

You know people were already quite paralyzed by by news and media now with AI becoming such a strong stronghold of it

It's going to be even harder and my kind of near term medium term thesis is that it's in a couple of years

It's going to be possible to consume news without your own filter that your own shield that your own kind of quality control of papers

This is a sea of noise I'm only going to let in things that care about and things that I feel like and trust and that filter is going to be a must

Because collecting or consuming information is going to be a defensive act I mean it already is in many ways

I think it's going to become a defensive act and so we're getting way ahead of that situation

But the trend towards that is only creating adding more urgency to our mission of creating a high fidelity channel

I signal channel that doesn't involve noise and its whole purpose is to serve the reader instead of serving an exterior motive of the advertiser or sponsor or a type platform

Yeah I mean it's crazy how fast it's evolving too like you know I used AI tools a lot I used Claude the other day to create an application

But I kind of know Python right but I just told it here's what I want and about 15 minutes later I saw it build all the code and give me a link

And I did some command line stuff and there's an app like that's insane

So like those are the kind of things that I think AI is really good at

Like coding tools like that and we see like leaps and bounds of words just getting better and better

Like one of the big tests for AI for me especially AI videos like oh I can tell it's AI generated because the guys playing the guitar and his fingers aren't actually plucking the strings

But I saw one what two days ago and dude it was hard to tell that it wasn't AI

Like other than the fact that it was you know a bunch of characters from Harry Potter you know all in a rock band

But like I paid really specific attention on like facial movements and how their hands interact with the instruments that they're playing and it has gotten scary good

So I think there needs to be you know I think Google talked about this is that with their app the VO31 they talked about putting like watermarks

And their AI generated stuff so people could tell that it's AI generated

Do you think like something like that an adoption wise needs to be like industry wide and that would help prevent a lot of this AI slop that we're seeing?

So yes and no right if you know that on its own like Sora is famous for having the watermarks

Sora by opening AI you know video generation tool I was one of like the first ones to go viral for creating these silly videos

Probably most of the cats you saw back in a day were from Sora they had the word marks I believe they still have the watermarks

Unfortunately for people who really want to trick who really want to kind of you know misrepresent that's not going to stop them

And that's not a strong enough structurally there's not a strong enough guardrail

I also think it complicates a little bit when you wrote the essay you wrote the code and then you put it into cloth to verify the confirm it to double check it to give you a second opinion

And now it has the watermark and it's like well should it have the watermark or is it mostly Jared's app with a little bit of help from just the tool

Right you get to use the tools you need it's nothing wrong with using tools

The bigger question that I'm asking is how do we get the watermark in the news industry because there it would be really nice

To say Sora this story was fully hallucinated by you know insert insert your favorite or your least favorite publisher

Yeah where's my news PS detector yeah people talk about food diets all the time right but almost nobody talks about their information diet man

So what does a healthy information diet actually look like I agree with the watermark man

I love that you bring the diet sort of analogy because you wouldn't in your right mind say that eating more is going to make you healthier

But we have we've inherited this framework that to be more informed you have to read and consume more information

No you don't know you don't it's just that you've been eating sort of high calorie low nutrition food

And you're kind of forced to keep eating it because it's not nutritious but wait a second

You're consuming more and more calories but you aren't actually getting the nutrition you're becoming intellectually cognitively information obese perhaps in the process

And then things get harder everything it's harder now you're hooked on this food now you can't eat anything else but this food

And we're creatures of habit and the creatures of patterns

And so information diets in the era of information obesity could not be a more pertinent topic

You know it's about what information you consume what information you let in through your filter that is going to want to make a difference

And before even you know judging it thematically or judging it based on any other kind of features of the information

Just ask yourself you know does this information that I'm letting in does it have an agenda

And if it has an agenda it's already in a different category of like oh I need to be careful

Oh I'm probably need to read this twice and then I have to read the left side then I'm going to have to read the right side

Then I'm going to have to read the upside and then I'm going to read the downside

Then I'm going to talk to a couple of friends and see what they read to triangulate what is actually happening

And at this point you've eaten so much content

It's your stomach is hurting your brain is hurting

And we believe and this goes back to the news minimalist kind of approach

Is that it's not about reading everything it's not also about reading more it's about reading things that have no agenda

It's about simplifying and minimizing content input such that you're getting things that are nutritious

And that allow you to make up your own mind instead of forcing you to swing a certain way

Yeah and I hope the 50,000 listeners and viewers that tuned in last week I heard I really hope that they heard that

Because I know they're driving down the highway right now and they're getting ready to go home after work and they're going to watch Fox News

Or they're going to watch CNN and they're going to eat that high calorie fatty information diet man

And I think everybody should give it a shot man go to inform dot now get the facts get it get it lean

Get it cleaned up a little bit and everyone should check that diet absolutely

Now you grew up between different cultures right Ukraine Israel and the US do people in different countries see the world fundamentally differently

Or do we all basically worry about the same things

Yeah I mean what we focus on in our news research

I really like calling us a news research company rather than a news company because what we produce is research output

That's our scale sets that we bring

We prioritize significance and we think of significance as a universal

The way we define significance is scale of effect it can't be you know 300 people

And be 3000 people it's going to have to be millions for it to have that significance flag for us of like hey

This is about to change the world and that's the first question right is like how many people are being affected

We don't focus on local accidents we don't focus on you know unfortunate airplane crash in Swahili

We focused on large world changing phenomenon and how does it have to change the world in order to be significant

Well it has to change the lives of that many people

What does changing a life mean it means changing and safety changes in security changes in optionality in obviously in the wealth

Changes in options overall in in healthcare in culture in in social war and peace type of levels

That's the scale of significance that we focus on and we think of that as as being universal right

So if it's changing the option choice of millions of people this is significant

If it is a local you know very loud accident in Swahili it's it's not significant

There are better local new sources that will dramatize that event and it will serve it up to you

We are not going to we we focus on world changing stuff

Now I think part of your question and correctly if I'm wrong is also just reflections on Ukraine, Israel, United States

Which are all places of heated information warfare in Ukraine you know in Ukraine it was bipolar in any way

It was Ukraine and Russia for a pretty long time and it was pretty black and white

Ukraine was kind of doing its own thing Russia was in injecting propaganda into our system

Injecting content that was malicious and very much intentionally created to mislead and to confuse and to disorient

Now it's all bubble of the surface but before any of this happened before the war started in 2022

It started in 2014 and before the war started in 2014 there was a decade of misinformation leading up to it

So information conflict precedes actual conflict and it's been happening for a while which is really unfortunate

When I moved to Israel I saw the explosion of polarization across not two poles but many different poles

Poles I guess polarities there's multi polarity in Israel

There's so many perspectives within Israel itself outside of Israel with Israel's friends with Israel's enemies

It's at the whole Middle East is such a circus of you know folks competing for buy-in into their version of the truth

Which at this point there is no more version of any truth it's very hard to tell what's going on

And so I just got to witness an explosion of perspectives everyone buying for your buy-in

In the United States it was sort of back to a bipolarity it was back to bipartisanship but what exploded this time is the volume and the multiplicity of outlets

We don't have nowhere near as much media in Ukraine as we have in the United States

The United States is a content size of Europe, size of a continent worth of entertainment, information of social media that is constantly pulsating and living life of its own

And so polarity became a bit more bipolar again but it became so much louder, so much more confusing and so much more just explosive

Yeah we export a lot of that around the world too

So one of the things you're talking about like Russia right it's kind of state-sponsored media

And they tell their citizens what they want them to hear and I think China does that a little bit too

Do you see something like your app being on an SMS platform a way to bypass that narrative in control or not really?

Totally, I mean we have such a direct access to a reader and we honor that level of access every single day

We have such crazy systems in place to make sure that the privacy, the honoring of our reader's attention is something they've never experienced before

Now let's say the SMS channel for us, the format that we use is more about preserving attention than flying under the reader of a government

I mean we do that anyway but you can do that with email

You can do that with really many other independent sources or independent formats

Where we shine with SMS or like the reason we chose SMS is because it allows us to pioneer a level of anonymity

with our users that they have not seen before

There are no accounts, there are no passwords

There is no ability for us even technically to read open rates and we don't

There is such a level of non-monitoring and non-information like non-data collection

And there's a level of privacy that's immediate

On email you can press and subscribe and you can press it six more times, they'll still send you stuff

There's nothing you can really do with SMS as soon as you text the word stop

The legal, huge compliance cellular system completely forbids messaging and it's instant and it doesn't falter

A lot of our users are anonymous, we don't even know who they are

And we don't care because we don't want to under some sort of excuse pretend that we're going to collect information

To improve your experience on this website, there is no website, there is no improving your experience

We do this one thing, we do it well, we look for people who want it

We don't want any information from you

So the SMS channel is less about the government stuff because you can accomplish another channel that's more about honoring privacy

To the extent of anonymity for our users

Yeah, I think that's pretty cool

It allows you to not have to worry about being compliant on storing everybody's data

And these huge data breaches, I think that would be honestly like a relief for a lot of these companies

To be able to not have to worry about that

So that's awesome that you guys do it that way

All right, let's fast forward 10 years here, man

Do you think the world would be more informed or more confused than we are today?

Well, it's interesting, 10 years is like I think it goes through the value of shadows that I was saying earlier

I think within 10 years there should be in a brighter spot

I'm very optimistic despite reading news every day

Which is, you know, when you read news 24 hours

And so in the process of that, some people can get pretty pessimistic

But we can say, ah, this is a lot of bad stuff happening

At the opposite effect on me, right, completely opposite

I'm really excited, I'm really optimistic

And I think the world is going through contortions

But on the way to a really bright future

So I think 10 years is going to be a great decade

Right, I think it's going to get a little more confusing in the next few

It's going to be confusing by year five

Maybe even confusing by year six or seven

But by the end of, you know, year eight, nine, ten onwards

I think we're going to have a media ecosystem

That has more options for people

And it's going to have the option that we are pioneering

Which is minimalism, mindfulness around media

And purposefulness, right?

And I'm not suggesting we're going to, you know, there's not going to be any more Fox readers

Or CNN readers

They're never going the way

And that's part of human experience

But right now there is no alternative for that

And we just want to create that alternative such that

We're the people that want to read news without noise

Want to read news to make up their own minds

That I'm having their mind made up for them

We want to have a very strong alternative

Out there for people to use

And I think ten years from now that we're not going to be the only ones

Yeah, I think that's great

So I'm going to take it back to your venture a little bit

So you've evaluated over 600 venture companies and deals, right?

What do you look for in a company?

And does inform.Now pass your own tests?

It's a great question because what I'm always looking for when it's advising, investing, helping another venture

Another project, whatever it is

Is their understanding of the customer, right?

They need to be intimately aware of the customer's problems, their needs, their profile

They need to be able to describe who they serve in excruciating detail

Right, I need to be able to be like, hey, stop telling me about the color of their underwear

Like I don't care, that's too much detail

It needs to be granular, it needs to be really, really granular

And in some ways, we don't pass that check

Because unlike other more pointed solutions, we are sort of used by such a diversity of people

Ideologically, income level geographically around North America

Obviously, age, gender, other kind of affiliations, backgrounds, education, no education

There is such a diversity of the user that we serve

But for us, we are always on the goal of trying to figure out who is it that we serve, who is our target person that we want to serve

And at the same time, with the absence of data collection, we also feel good about

It makes that discovery very difficult

And so in some ways, right, we have archetypes, we have guesses, hypotheses

And a good amount of research that we do on top of our operations

But if I was an investor coming into the forum. Now, and I say, hey, you guys

Doesn't seem like you know who your user is

And that's in some ways true

Because we don't have such a specific product for such a specific person

We are used by the Gen X, we're used by the Gen Z

And there's not that much in common between those two categories

Or between those two groups, we're used by radical left and radical rate

And the people that would not even realize that the other person is drinking from the same source

And it's sort of like the donkey or the mule and the elephant or things the elephant

It comes in the same well, they come in the same well to drink the water

And I love that we've been able to build the well that all the barn animals and the mules and the elephants can drink from

But it's crazy, they don't even realize that we are building something that is so unpartisan

It is so non-biased in a way that anyone can drink from it

If you're just someone who's interested in the facts, someone who wants to be formed without being influenced

I like that generation outlook too that you mentioned in there

And so I mean every generation believes that they're living in the most chaotic of times, right?

Every generation does

Do you think our era is actually unique or is this just the latest version of human tribal storytelling, I guess?

Our era is definitely very unique in terms of archivabilities have changed

I am a technologist, if you ask me if I was religious, I'd say of course I'm religious, I'm a futurist, I'm a technologist

My belief, I'm also a capitalist that is definitely my religion

So on the note of like our living in unique times, we definitely are

Because from my kind of world view, personal to me, I think a lot of people shared a lot of people don't

Is human kind of advancement ecology

Everything else, policy, environment, social, everything is almost like a lagging,

Effect behind technological progress

Logical progress, first and foremost, advances the human race, right?

Whether that's the printing press, which is technology, or electricity, which is technology, or now AI, right?

Technology moves us all forward

And because that capability shift has happened and is currently happening, we're living in a very unprecedented time

Very, very unprecedented time where the technology we built, we don't fully understand

And the technology we built is more capable than the average us, significantly more capable

And so we're definitely living in a weird, weird, funky, exciting times

And that's also showing on our media

And I definitely, you know, the short answer to your question is, yeah, we're living through unique times

It's not a rerun

Do you think the most of the division in America is, do you think it's actually real, or are we just seeing the loudest 10% of people amplified by algorithms?

Most of the division, you said?

Yeah, yeah, do you think most of the division in America is actually real?

I think a lot of it, I would say the division, it's hard to say if it's real or not, because it is real now

If people experience it, then it's real, but it was artificially instigated

I think a very good chunk of the division that we see, which I would say is civil war level at this point

And we wouldn't call it that because we're living through it, where the frogs slowly boiling in a pot

But the history books might remember this time as a civil war

It is a cultural civil war that's for sure

And people are very angry, very frustrated, and it is not normal

You know, what's been happening recently is not something we should have grown numb to, I don't think

And so, I think a lot of the division that we've been seeing is, you know, called real or not

It's been to a great degree artificially insuminated, artificially instigated

And it's instigated by media that apart from the bias of one side is crazy, other side is crazy

Is thriving on sensationalism

I think the biggest sin of modern day legacy news media is not the bias

The bias is an age-old sin that everyone should be embarrassed by, but that isn't even the worst thing

The sensationalism with which information is disseminated

The sensational with which everything is a clickbait or ragebait

That to me is what's really driving the division and forcing a division where there isn't even necessarily one to be found

Yeah, I would agree

Alright, man, we've reached the portion of the show that I'd call Jared's Five

Jared's Five

Alright, this is where I get to ask you some fun questions

So, one is from our previous guest for you

Couple softball questions, couple kind of hard questions

And then you'll have a chance to give us a question for our next guest

Alright, so our last guest was Adam

Gosh, so his last name

Michael?

No

My cell

My cell

And his question for you is if you were president for a day, what's one thing that you would do to unite the people over?

Hmm

I think the...

The power of in-person connection is being rediscovered across the world right now

I think we've spent a couple of years during the pandemic coming out of the pandemic scared

Not hanging out, not seeing each other, not going to third places in our communities

And I think it's got to have to be something to do with enabling in-person experiences

Right?

Whether that's gifting a dinner to every family in, you know, in the United States

Such that, hey, this is like a small micrograd almost to put on a Thanksgiving-like dinner and in the country of neighbors

Right?

And, you know, we are we want to support people coming together

It's a very, you know, off the very quick answer,

and I'd probably think a little bit harder

on this if I was president,

but I would wanna do something that very tangibly

gives, you know, a small gesture of support,

but a tangible gesture of support of, hey,

bring other people to the dinner table,

bring your neighbors, bring your friends,

bring people you haven't connected with in a while,

bring them to the dinner table and just hang out in person.

Yeah, it's great.

All right, easy one.

What's your favorite movie of all time?

Lots of options to pick from.

One that comes to mind immediately

is a 1967 film, an art house film,

called Blower by Nicolangelo Antonioni,

which to me, it's a wonderful, wonderful time capsule

of a time I have not lived,

but the character in that movie

really sort of strikes a tone with me,

strikes a note with me, I love,

I love the character exposition

and I love the time capsuleing

that that film is able to deliver.

Now I have to check that out, I've got our development.

Well, I can see that you have a great taste in film

based on your posters and the thousand kind of.

He does.

Yeah, I've watched quite a few movies,

probably too many, but, you know, whatever.

All right, favorite cartoon growing up as a kid.

Tom and Jerry introduced me to jazz

and I think that's a really important thing

that Tom and Jerry's not given credit for.

The soundtrack of all the original Tom and Jerry films

contained the most enriching jazz tracks

that are really worth ingesting as a kid

and I just think that's something

that nobody gives Tom and Jerry credit for.

But they introduced me to jazz

which is now a really big part of my life.

That's cool.

It's a cool angle on it, too, I didn't think about.

All right, what's one thing that people don't know

about you that maybe they should?

Gosh, there's so many things, right?

One thing that keeps them eye on them,

I just get really passionate about is,

I'm a really passionate surfer.

I love surfing a lot and I really want to learn

how to kite surf.

I've never tried it in my surfing circles.

I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit it

because I feel at this point, I'm like,

do you have been trying it now?

You're not cool and I'm a very passionate surfer

in like a traditional board sense

and I'm really, really keen to try kite surfing

and this is a confession to all my surfing friends

that I haven't done it yet.

And if I'm not invited to the next

Angolo party, I apologize or I'll be a part of the tribe.

There's no time like the present to learn, though, man.

It's cool.

All right, if you can go back in time

and tell your teenage self one thing, what would it be?

I love saying this is my favorite thing.

I don't think I made this up,

but I definitely embody this.

It's everything, have the power to make you stronger

if you let it.

Yeah, that's a great one.

All right, you were questioned for our next guest.

Can be anything.

Yeah, gosh, I keep it simple.

You know, you're such a tough questioner.

So I want the next guest to have a really easy time.

My question for them is to just, you know, reflect on a hobby

that they had as a kid that has faded from their life.

And do they want to bring it by?

Oh, I can.

Yeah, that's a good one, man.

All right, Kira, this has been a fascinating conversation, man.

If people want to check out what you're building,

they can head over to inform.now.

And for everyone listening, if you've enjoyed this conversation,

make sure you like, subscribe and share that episode, man.

Because that's how independent shows like ours

keep these conversations going.

Kira Shishkin, everybody, thanks for joining us on CommonX.

If you're tired of being told what to think,

and you'd rather actually think,

welcome to the 1%.

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CommonX.

Hey, man, it's supposed to be at the same time.

We are CommonX though, man.

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