SWL Week in Review - Launch of The Information TV + MZ live interview

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

7/14/2025, 3:31 PM

A slightly delayed week in review send to wait for the launch of The Information TV (TITV), congrats to jess & team...!

The Launch of TITV :: MZ live at 10:30 PST

Tune in live today for The Information's first independent live daily show… I feel like I am watching a version of the movie ‘saturday night’ in the run up as I write this note. Obviously there has been plenty of live tech TV coverage for years… and I have heard jess toying with what deal they should do with networks for as long as I can remember, but the TBPN boys have shown that in 2025 you can go direct and just ‘do it live’ yourself (nice job guys)… so – welcome TITV which should be excellent analysis and guests daily. More soon, but tune in for the kickoff / first show today with special guest Mark Zuckerberg live to discuss what he is doing over there with this whole ‘superintelligence’ thing (and whatever else)... and apparently I got a thursday slot! :)

More or Less :: with Anatoly Yakovenko co-founder of Solana on the Punks vs. the Hoodies vs. the Suits

THX bitcoin for ripping this week. Fortuitously, on More or Less Jessica and I got to sit down late last week with Anatoly and discuss what is actually up… if you are in crypto twitter you know Toli… if not, the man is hilarious and brilliant on all things / a truly great shit-poster to boot… The important stuff we discussed on the episode is the breaks on USD stables vs. the VC loved narrative of ‘local stables’ – and the direction that goes in / why it will turn out to be absurdly good for the US if it keeps tending towards USD land… we also talk the talent issue with building good ‘crypto’ projects in practice, the solana phone, etc.

Hot Takes

XRP and BTC pacing in 2013 chris larsen gave a group of us at a small conference session 50,000 XRP and 1 BTC as part of a session on the future of money… to play with (probably $100 bucks at the time if that) ...the funny part is that 12+ years later at bitcoin 120K… the equivalent XRP is 150K – all ships rise A LOT

Merit First AI Literacy Test At this point I think you are basically crazy to hire anyone who doesn’t deeply understand how to use AI tools for leverage in their job/work… regardless of what that work is. I certainly won’t… The team over at merit has made a great short example live test on how to measure for that (and honestly merit first is crushing / platform is looking great) – so check it out.

Post-GDP, the goal should be max per-capita power consumption this was an old column I wrote in The Information in 2014 talking about how GDP was becoming a silly metric to evaluate the economy and what comes next… seems in our AI age to be newly relevant. As I said then I really want a whole star system of power just for myself.

Lettermeme - What Matters is the Themes I obviously keep pushing this because i so enjoy it/ working on it – big twist for me working on it is really the cool part is taking all the newsletters I like and remixing them daily by theme / take… and I do think this approach (splitting out proper nouns and key points, then aggregating, etc. is pretty good use of AI / actually works really well

Shaquille O'Neal, Lux VC & My Son The 6 Year Old Zenefits Exec – and hilariously this is where AI breaks… I have built some pipelines to run all my contacts through people data labs and then gemini and build a little personal CRM with a Q&A / chat interface… It generally works great BUT it is funny how convinced it is that Shaquille O’Neal works for lux capital, and that my 6 year old was a senior exec at zenefits (which if you read the bio it is so confident in is very funny because clearly it is just making up a mixture of my wife’s bio and mine + the information’s major stories

The Information's Deep Research speaking of The Information – TITV is the ‘big’ launch of the week BUT their newly launched deep research tool is actually awesome. The point (beyond it being a great resource)... if you are a news org or actually good at having your own trusted content you are insane to sell a license at pennies on the dollar to AI interface companies and let yourself get front-ended… it isn't that hard to build your own

Which brings me to Cloudflare’s AI ‘gate’ launch I love cloudflare as a company… one of the only stocks I have ever bought on the public market… and have been ranting for ages about updating the robots.txt framework, how companies should be chaffing AI bots with fake data when they try to crawl, etc. All true – but all these attempts (cloudflare, google’s news micropayments bs, etc.) are all pretty foolhearty IMHO – good marketing, wrong approach for anyone building serious businesses

Crypto IS the only meaningful platform shift at play… the twitter folks picked this one up again from 2023… I still stand behind it – yes AI is a big deal, but it compounds the winners… the only disruptive thing going on is in crypto

Best, Sam

P.S. ... i am curious if people have 'creator' 'media' focused newsletters they really respect / think the authors are smart?

P.P.S while you are at it -- if you have any creators you LOVE in whatever weird specific niche you are interested in (knitting to god-knows-what)... LMK – what I really care about? Audience needs to be non-zero but can be small (100,000 really engaged followers is fine but they should be growing), they need a core of fanatics who LOVE them / core cult + some direction beyond merch in terms of business oppys & a deep fire / hunger to be the ‘god’ of whatever weird stuff they are in to :)

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