Frustrated founder built her own "Brain Rot Bot" to aggregate $1,199/yr of paid news subs
juliey4 · x · 2026-10-27
Julie Young, founder & CEO of Laurel, shared at INMA Media Tech & AI Week how her "brain rot bot" — which went viral among news execs earlier this year — came to be.
Her reasoning: LLM-generated fake news made social platforms unusable ("manufactured rage loops"), pushing her to pay hundreds of dollars for Financial Times. But FT's interface "has not meaningfully changed in 40+ years" — inbox clutter and unpersonalized long-form — so she built her own tool combining social-media brevity and personalization with paid-news accuracy.
The bot now aggregates FT ($429/yr), 10 Substack newsletters ($631/yr), New Scientist, Mobile Dev Memo, and ParentData ($1,199/yr total), adds categories tailored to her toxicology/consumer-health company, and pulls in Twitter by summarizing top conversations from her circle. She says it dramatically cut time wasted sorting real from fake, and recommends the approach.
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