Sam Lessin on Media & Content

Essays

From the Podcast

Well, this guy emailed me. This is definitely getting paid for. This is actually very exciting, guys. I have a first ever on air ad. Someone wrote me back on my newsletter and had this whole thing and he said, Sam, I want to advertise on your podcast. So you ready? This is our ad. It's from getvictor.com.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 139

They should buy OpenAI. It's like she's immediately buying, I'm sorry, she's immediately buying Snap to put buttons in

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 97

I don't know, was like a first attempt. It was an early attempt at media and marketing and mass market.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

Well, I think the difference is, like, well, first of all, I think there's a big difference between apologizing. I think there's a big difference between apologizing for like product versus apologizing for content and marketing. Like I just think those like very different veins. Well, that was hilarious. That was social media is chairs.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

And I love Raj. He's a dear friend. But he's kind of the business guy. totally is the hardcore genius. And totally is amazing. And he put out this thing being like, this was a mistake and the whole night. I was like, wow, that's great. This might be the 201 media strategy, which is, you know, 2025 101 PR crisis comms is like, never ever ever apologize for anything. Right? 201 might be if you apologize the right way. That's actually probably better. So credit to totally but it was a wild moment.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

Well, it's they took it down, which I actually was the right everyone's like, why do you I was like, actually, think it's exactly initially I saying you can't in 2025 apologize. Like it's the PR 101 is you do not apologize. So you just take it down and you move on, which I think was the right move because it was clearly an incredibly stupid piece of media. Now I will say Anatoly who's awesome today actually put out a tweet. He's he's the technical founder. He's like the fact that the guy the genius behind Solana it's like Raj and Anatoly.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

It was, and it's like the sentiment on it is actually not, mean, I don't agree with everything. There's a lot I agree with. Um, but the funny thing is, is like, completely missed the media memo on this because it's exactly to a message that if like Roger Anatoly, both of them are great, had like gotten up or one of the leaders and said, is what I believe. I authentically believe this. I stand behind it. It actually would have been basically fine. Like, but instead they like did the opposite, which is the, it's the, in comms hired actors.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

right of youth attention and belief and etc. That would be the bold statement of being like, this is just not a thing we want anymore. We clearly are like not in that zone. We're in some zone of some weird ass deal making right for slices of whatever and infrastructure and blah, blah, blah. And then your eyes just glaze over. And by the way, this is not a bad media strategy, right? Which is like you just throw everything against the wall. And then people like me get bored in the details, right? Because it's like

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 90

It's like, which narrative do you want to pay attention to? Look, Larry Ellison owning TikTok would be hilarious, which kind of makes me think it would happen. Because like, think the guy has no, I've never seen him on social media, let alone dancing.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 90

Because you're in the media business and people want to read about it, because the morons want to read about it and they'll pay you for it, so sure.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 90

The thing I don't understand is that when you, you're the only person who uses Lyft, like you are a hundred percent of Lyft's business. And so, but you're a very good customer. And the thing I don't understand is that, that none of the hedge fund bots immediately respond to this news and just short of the, you know, Lyft is only down 50 % on the year. Cause like, and it should be down a hundred percent because you're like their only customer and you're going to have no use for them soon.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 90

Well, it's Well, but the thing I keep in mind is again, like the question is whether it's a cost or value. Because the thing that the social media does is it monetizes like waiting in lines. It monetizes like, people are less angry at the airport because of TikTok, right? Because they just sit in their fucking seats and like doom scroll and then they're like not angry about the time wasted. Whereas the interesting thing about going to a sporting event is you're investing not only the money, but a shit ton of like solid block time, which is very expensive, right? So in some ways it has to pay for the amount of time.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

Maybe. It did suck immediately back out. Right. So it really was a one time Trump make rich. But I would say that I don't know. think like the thing that's gonna happen is you can it's not like the type of thing you can just play that game over and over and over. I think you need like escalating seriousness for anyone to care. like Trump make the next tweet from Trump will have if this Trump if this one moved Cardano 40 % because no one thought it was an important thing. And it's not but it happens to be heavily traded and whatever like next time we'll have half the effect.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

Which again, in the spectrum of social media and internet scale, these are very small numbers.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

Well, I'll give you another again, which is I was at one of these many conferences this week, media conference with Muckety Mucks. That's what I do at ski conferences this time of year. But there's always a really good quiz in it. And I have to say, my team, was very upset. We were one question away from winning the quiz. I'm very upset that we did not win the quiz. We lost on an easy question.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

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