SWL Week in Review - Shipping the Shifting $500B of Risk to Pensioners

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

8/14/2026, 9:29 PM

MORE OR LESS — WITH DENG, WOLFE, HOLT, BELSKY, and STANFORD

A very special edition of More or Less… Dave, Brit, and Jess left me alone so I replaced them with Josh Wolfe (Founder, Lux Capital), Rachel Holt (Founder, Construct Capital; former Head of North America at Uber), Scott Belsky (Partner, A24; Founder, Behance), Scott Stanford (Founder, Acme Capital), and Peter Deng (GP, Felicis; formerly Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Airtable, and OpenAI) — this is a great group of people all of whom I respect (shocker) and love bullshitting with / had a lot of fun with this one and actually even learned some things / very important perspective on who is the ‘bag holder’ on all the GPUs (how NVIDIA smartly learned from Lucent), context on departures from OpenAI vs. Internet 2.0 style exec turnover, etc. Only drawback is I got no interest shopping done during this podcast.

HOT TAKES

Building Back Up HRV — sleep, restarted running after a year off, and "Chinese" peptides I started about a month ago… the internet had a LOT of questions. whatever it is — it seems to be working… and I am excited to get blood draw updates next week back in the bay!

My Bot Wrote Slow's Quarterly Letter — not the real one… but I asked it to try just to see, and it's pretty good — good enough that I would stand behind it — then again, it is just distilling my tweets anyway.

30 Under 30, Pitch Perfect — no notes.

K-Shape Within the 1% — it's showing up in yachts… predictable, but still funny. stratification doesn't stop at the top decile — it fractals all the way up.

Index Funds Won't Save the Kids — index funds are fine if you have a job forever and keep adding (or are already rich)… but a kid with cents can't compound their way to the life they see on IG. it isn't a returns problem — it's an expectation + meaning + cost problem.

My Bot Noticed the Rusty Chains — the bot now processes all my photos… unprompted it picked up rusty chains on a porch swing and suggested a swap with right chain type & where there are paint chips around the house. this is what ambient AI actually looks like.

Capitalism Won't Get You Interplanetary — love the spirit, but capitalism works on a 5-10 year timeframe max… for interplanetary you need memetic / narrative capitalism — value stored in the STORY itself, not the DCF.

DPI Is the Only Thing That Matters — and everyone is distributing right now… my JPM account is full of 12-share distributions of tech companies I have only vaguely heard of — but money is money!
Fine, I will run the New York Marathon — this is gonna hurt... but given that I have to be in NYC the week before seems silly not to!
James on Onlyfans — Very fun to see Jessica interview James & to hear James start to tell the story!... it is an exciting one.

Best,
Sam

P.S. The internet is hilarious … this is a great way to market — and a healthy source of news — also the TV show Tires is back, It’s always sunny comes back this week — Mary Beth Barone is quite funny on Netflix, and The Invite is streaming (both very funny and smart)

P.P.S. Mav slayed his 7 year old rite-of-passage climb up Mt. Washington — there is a movie — 2 min version in the carousel and for the really dedicated there is a 30 min full version with a candy journey and more … DM me. I can’t wait to make the capstone one with W in a few years.

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